Highway Don't Care
by ThePsiFiles
Summary: 2012M'verse w/ comicbook elements. Judge Cornelius takes the highway from Pittsburgh Gate to Big Tri. Guarding a truck delivering through the Cursed Earth isn't easy - but it's harder with muties, amusement parks and 'coasters! Ride on! Thrills connect! Opening chapters are serious; later ones have comic-book silliness! For details on fanon setting, see my profile.
1. Hawkridge

A/n : Detailed author's notes for this story appear at the end of each chapter. General notes about my "Dredd" fanon setting (and links to inspiration pictures etc.) appear on my profile.

This story takes place about five months after "Aegis", the day after "Flash the Bronze" (mid to late August). It follows on from the events in those stories, so it might not make sense without having read them. This story was written both to explain things in my fandom (and engage in some fun character- and world-building), but also to "bridge the gap" between the very serious movie-verse and the (often) much more silly and lighthearted comic-verse. This story starts quite serious but, as it moves along, becomes sillier and more satirical (and, more action-packed).

If you enjoyed this story (and even if you didn't) please review – even if it is just a "good fic / bad fic" review (although more detail is nice). Without reviews, I don't know if I am writing things people want to read, or what needs to be changed or have more of / less of for future stories.

I have a _very_ simple rule – if you leave a review for me, I _will_ leave a review for you. I don't care what sort of stories you write, or even if I am familiar with the fandom – I will leave a review.

**Highway Don't Care**

**Prog 1 : Hawkridge**

Highway 70 runs – a thick, black, multileveled asphalt nerve – through the heart of the creature that is Mega City One. Its course is almost, but not-quite, straight – running west-by-north-west from old Baltimore on the oil-smirched shores of the Cheaply-Speak Bay all the way to the Pittsburgh Gate, its first fifty-or-so miles skirting the northern edge of the capital zone. The two-hundred and fifty mile journey is not the longest between two points in Mega City One – that honor would go to the distance between old Boston north of Rad Island and Raleigh-Durham on the southern border, with Union City just inside the Radhattan boundary wall to the Pittsburgh Gate being the latitude where the city was widest east-west – but it was the longest possible without having to leave the highways or even switch from one to another.

Very few people made the whole journey, of course – and even fewer in a single sitting. There was no call for the average citizen to travel so far – most, if the truth be told, did not even leave their blocks, let alone journey through a dozen sectors from one side of the city to the other – and, if there was need, it was likely they would pull off the highway; pausing at rest-stops, getting out to stretch their legs or grab a bite to eat, attending to calls of nature, or simply taking a moment to be a tourist and see the various sights and sounds of the city the highway traveled past and through.

Highway 70 was a vital thoroughfare in the city, connecting densely-populated areas with each other and deeply-linked into the rest of the road grid. The asphalt was thick with cars, trucks, and bikes – piloted by citizens or with their systems linked into the central AutoDrive database, turning onto the highway, peeling off it, driving for a mile or twenty along the outer lanes, leaving the central, elevated, express lane with its minimal exits all-but-empty for the most part.

At the maximum safe-and-permitted (non-emergency, non-pursuit, express highways only) speed of a lawmaster bike the journey from old Baltimore to the Pittsburgh Gate took two hours. Judge John Cornelius entered the express lane of the highway at junction 1 and immediately accelerated to 125 mph, leaning forward so his helmet and shoulders fitted into the slipstream of the bike's fairing and reduced both the drag and the amount of road-dust plastering his face. It was oh-nine-thirty hours – more than enough time to get to the Pittsburgh Gate by his self-imposed deadline of noon.

There were few cars on the express lane, most of the vehicles piloted by AutoDrive, keeping to a precise and unvarying speed on the straight, smooth, flat road. Cornelius concentrated on driving; even with the lawmaster's built-in safety features – ABS, terrain-sensitive tires, traction control, radar and GPS uplinks, even lifesign- and bio-reading software to wake him if he started to doze off – a buck-and-a-quarter of speed wasn't something to be taken lightly. There was something almost hypnotic about the black tarmac eaten up beneath the wheels, the white lane markings flicking by at stroboscopic speeds, the regular appearance every two-hundred-and-eighty-eight seconds of the ten-mile exits, the distractions of the mega-structures whipping past as sector after sector was passed through as only variations in the blur.

Two hours later, his hands cramped on the handlebars, his face thick with dust, the base of his spine aching, he glanced in his mirror and changed lane, peeling off the express lane and spiraling down the exit ramp towards the Pittsburgh Gate waystation. Thanks to the height of the elevated highway and his visor's vision enhancement he could see the details of the boundary wall clearly – it was a massive structure, impressive even by the standards of Mega City One. Hundreds of feet high, thicker at the base, the parapet at the top wide enough for a two-lane road on which Judges and sentry auxiliaries patrolled on lawmasters and lesser bikes. The wall was buttressed on the inside – outside, the not-infrequent storms which tore the cracked rad desert into howling dust would pile great drifts of radioactive sand against the walls if there were anything to trap them.

The Pittsburgh Gate itself was not a simple portal; there was a monstrous armored door which could accommodate two or more of the largest vehicles imaginable abreast, flanked by two huge pyramidal towers built of steel-clad reenforced concrete topped with enormous weapon installations. Two single-lane tunnels – one for entry, one for egress – penetrated the base of each tower, wide and tall enough to allow a truck, tanker or APC through without difficulty. A trench with a retractable bridge, hydraulic blastdoors and a last-ditch deadfall portcullis protected each end of the tunnels, and Cornelius knew explosives were embedded in key structural members inside the towers, ready to collapse the tunnels at a moment's notice.

The waystation was a large plaza of blacktop asphalt, fueling stations to one side, a bank of automat vending machines on the other, selling everything from hot drinks to K-rations to underwear. White lines and LED notices directed vehicles towards a row of booths between the plaza and the gate itself – monominded robots ran the booths, with sentry auxiliaries ready to step in should it be needed. Beyond the booths, in front of the gate itself, a bridge to nowhere straddled the highway – a curved ramp on either side leading up to a railed observation deck. Up there, sitting astride an idling lawmaster, a cloaked Judge silently observed – watching nothing, seeing everything.

Cornelius eased his lawmaster to a stop at a refueling station. "What will it be, Sir?" the dedicated robot buzzed. "How about this weather, eh?" The question was a pre-programmed gambit – the machine only understood temperature to more accurately dispense fuel and air pressure in tires. It would use a series of stock phrases in response to anything, producing a reasonable facsimile of a distracted conversation between a gas station attendant and a weary motorist.

"Fill her up and give her the once over," said Cornelius, holding his hand in front of the scanner so the authorization in his gauntlet could be read. Although the robot was not humanoid – it was a multi-limbed model, built into the fuel pump itself – the scanner module was fashioned something like a face; two visual sensors above a speaker, dished microphones on either side of the swiveling 'head'.

The robot turned to 'face' him, clicking and whirring for a few seconds, communicating with the Hall of Justice and verifying his authorization. "Judge Cornelius, John R," it said. "Pee. Ess. Eye. Division," it continued in a disjointed tone. Cornelius started and turned to it with his brows drawing together in puzzlement – he'd got so used to hearing the fuel-'bots say 'Sector One-Nineteen' his new assignment came as a surprise, as did the fact the robotics programmers hadn't got around to teaching the machines to say rather than spell the word.

"It's 'psi'," he said, uselessly.

"Not bad for this time of year," the robot responded. Cornelius suppressed the urge to kick it sharply, instead stepping to the side as its flexible arms reached out, lifting the fairing of his bike, checking spark plugs and fluid levels, and attaching a hose to pump fuel into the tank. The robot worked for a less than a minute, and then its arms retracted and its 'head' turned towards him. "All good, Judge," it buzzed. "Think it might rain later?"

Cornelius ignored it, swinging himself back into the saddle and driving towards the border-control booths. In what might be considered an ironic twist by someone who hadn't thought it through, greater scrutiny was brought to bear on Judges leaving the city than citizens – but it made perfect sense. Mega City One was not – despite the all-enclosing wall, panopticon surveillance and the omnipresent Judges-as-guards – a prison; the people were free to go and (even, with certain restrictions) come as they pleased. Citizens left the city – both temporarily and permanently – for many reasons, and not infrequently. Caravans striking out to make a new life in the Cursed Earth were, while not common, not an unheard of sight.

But the authority of the Judges ended – officially, at least – at the boundary wall, with the exception of a few extra-territorial possessions such as Big Tri. A Judge's place was within the walls; policing, protecting, serving, judging the citizens of Mega City One. For him to leave the city was a serious matter, requiring not only a solid reason but authorization at multiple levels.

Cornelius had all that, of course – he lifted his gauntlet to the robot as its scanners swept him and his bike. In the same voice as the fueling robot – doubtless they used the same voice module; a standard, mass-produced, off-the-rack component – it said his name and, once again, spelled out his assignment. "Pass to Big Tri okay-okay. Report to Gatewarden for briefing." Cornelius lowered his wrist and grasped the handlebars again, lifting his foot off the ground to drive away, only to stop and look at the machine with disbelief when it buzzed, "Have a nice day, Judge."

"Thanks," muttered Cornelius without conviction as he pulled away, easing his bike towards the observation deck and driving gingerly up the sloping ramp. The figure astride the lawmaster – the Gatewarden, the senior Judge in charge of the Pittsburgh Gate – did not turn as he approached. He stopped his own bike a respectful distance away and dismounted, turning off the engine and flicking down the kickstand. It was a courteous gesture – protocol dictated the Gatewarden brief him on the limits of his authority beyond the city, what he could and could not do, what J-Dept would and would not do for him out there. Most of the time, Street Judges remained seated on their bikes, engines still running, enduring the briefing – a briefing that was rushed and perfunctory – with undisguised annoyance. He took off his helmet and held it under his left arm, extending his right hand. "John Cornelius, Sector One . . ." he began, and then checked himself with a self-deprecating laugh. "Sorry – Psi Division," he corrected.

The Judge was wearing a long cloak over street fatigues and armor as protection against the scouring wind and dust from the Cursed Earth. It was gleaming justice-blue, the hems overlapping on the right side, a massive gilded-bronze eagle similar to that of Class I Dress on the shoulder. The helmet was a full-face model, the cylinders of bulky filters jutting either side of a snout-nosed respirator. The featureless visage turned towards him. "Hello, JC," the Judge said. The voice was muffled badly by the mask, but he thought he recognized it – certainly, he _should_ recognize the voice of anyone using his old Academy nickname!

"Kris?" he asked, uncertainly. His face and eyes were screwed up against the wind, sand being driven into his teeth as he spoke. "That you under there?" A laugh came from behind the mask – a laugh he did not recognize and could not interpret, thanks to both the muffling respirator and the fact he had not, now he thought about it, really ever heard Kris laugh before. "Oh, come on!" he exclaimed. "A minute breathing this spug won't kill you – uncover, for Grud's sake, and put me out of my misery!"

With a short, economical movement, the Judge flicked the cloak over her shoulders and reached up to take the mask off. For the second time in as many days, Cornelius was treated to the cliched reveal of beautiful Judge's face as she removed her helmet and shook her blonde hair out. "You didn't recognize me?" Crystal Hawkridge asked. She did not sound petulant or mocking – there was a touch of genuine hurt in her voice. "I know we weren't tight at the Academy, but . . ."

Cornelius had the good grace to blush – both in shame at not having recognized her, but also as embarrassing memories came flooding back. It was certainly true he and Hawkridge hadn't been particularly close friends at the Academy, but that had not been for want of him trying for at least two particular semesters.

Crystal Hawkridge had been – and still was, if he was honest – the most mechanically beautiful woman he had ever met or even seen. She was a tall, shapely blonde; long-limbed and cleanly muscled, with relatively broad shoulders, comfortably wide hips and an athletically-narrow waist with delectable hard-soft abs. Her face was exquisite – pitch-perfect symmetry framing sapphire-blue eyes and a flawless cupid's-bow mouth. Even now, after being compressed in a helmet, it only took a single shake of her head for her hair to fall back into its chin-length banged bell, the tapered ends curling into her jawline. Despite himself, he felt his heart thump once, twice; heavy and hollow and empty in his chest.

Hawkridge and Cornelius had been part of the same induction at the Academy, and they should have shared more classes than they did. But, as fate (or perhaps luck, Cornelius reflected as he remembered just how doe-eyed and foolish he'd been over her just a few years ago) would have it, they'd been assigned to separate, parallel streams for almost everything. They'd shared the same free periods and not-a-few friends, but beyond that had little contact. That had not stopped Cornelius from developing a hopeless crush on her – or, perhaps, had even contributed to it. Without any real interaction he'd been able to project some idealized notion of womanhood onto her, subconsciously convincing himself he should love her chastely from afar as relationship, marriage and consummation were impossible because of both of their betrothals and impending marriages to The Law. Declining grades, bad poetry slipped into her locker, and a lot of reading of _Le Morte d'Arthur_ had followed.

The Academy's shrink had assured him it was natural, nothing to be concerned about, and even expected and planned for within the Academy's psychological programs. He'd nevertheless urged Cornelius to speak to a tutor he trusted, and he'd willingly gone to Novak. She – his long-time confidant – had been unabashedly direct. "So help me Grud, Cornelius," she'd snapped, "I'm going to ban you from reading all that drokking Malory spug. You're not Lancelot, this is the Academy of Law not Camelot, and she's no princess. You barely _know_ her – honestly, if you did, I don't think you'd like her. Get your head out of fairytales and back into the textbooks. You're not so good I can't kick your ass, and don't think I won't." Knowing the power of both Novak's logic and her left hook, he'd done as she advised.

Cornelius wasn't even sure if Hawkridge had known of his . . . whatever it was (he still didn't really have a name for it) for her; he'd not signed the poems (although there had been clues enough within them to guess) and he'd never expressed his feelings to her. Maybe mutual friends had mentioned it – if so, she'd not said anything to him on the infrequent occasions they spoke. Perhaps she'd thought it best to just let it go – she had not, of course, been unused to male Cadets crushing on her. As they entered the last few years of the Academy, they'd had less and less interaction as he spent a lot of his free-time tutoring the younger Cadets and she started to take more and more SJS-friendly electives. It had been an open secret Rawne had been grooming her to enter IA when she graduated.

All of this went through Cornelius' mind as she smiled nervously at him. "I'm sorry, Kris," he said, "I just didn't expect to see you here." He immediately regretted his choice of words – wall duty wasn't a plum assignment, although Pittsburgh Gatewarden was a surprisingly senior position for someone only five-months out of the Academy. At least he hadn't mentioned her expected position in SJS. "It's good to see you – how've you been?"

Her smile broadened – she seemed genuinely excited to see a friendly face, someone she knew, someone with the dust of the street on his uniform and blood on his daystick. "Good, good," she said a little too-brightly. She immediately shifted the conversation to him. "How about you?" she asked. "I heard you got Dredd as your assessor? How'd that go?"

Cornelius shrugged. "I passed," he said with a grin. "He's a really good Judge – learned a lot from him. You?"

"Gibson," she said shortly. She looked down at the screen on her bike – glancing surreptitiously, he could see it showed the all-access portions of his file. She scrolled quickly through. "Level _seven_?" she asked, amazed. "And what's P.S.I. Division? Weren't you in sector one-nineteen?"

He smiled, but there was a careful thinness to it. "It's _psi_," he said. "You been following my career, Kris?" he asked softly.

She laughed, pointing at the screen. "It's all right here, JC," she told him. He found he didn't like her laugh – she'd smiled often at the Academy, but laughter had been rare. "Executive officer of HULA _Aegis_?" she asked. "What's a HULA? What's _Aegis_?"

"Do we really want to talk about our assignments?" Cornelius asked rhetorically. He didn't give her an opportunity to answer. "I thought you were going for SJS," he said. "What are you doing on the wall?" Her blue eyes narrowed and ice gathered in their corners. Cornelius was struck, once again, by her mechanical perfection – she could have, without a single piece of biosculpting, held her own against the most superb of Mega City One's supermodels, even given the computer-generated SimOnes a run for their credits. She was suddenly frosty and distant, her eyes cold and her straw-blonde hair tart as a lemon. Unbidden, the gasoline-fire blue of Anderson's eyes, the richness of her thick, unruly hair and the tumbling, muscular rainstorm of her laugh stole into his mind and he realized he was totally over Crystal Hawkridge.

What he might have realized or not about Cassandra Anderson was a different matter.

Hawkridge shrugged. "Tutor Rawne was my ticket to the fast-track," she said, a little bitterly. "So, if I want SJS – and I'm not really sure I do, anymore," she added, a little too-casually, "I have to do it the regular way. They want to see broad experience – the more divisions the better."

Cornelius nodded. "Pittsburgh Gatewarden's a good position," he said encouragingly. "You should be proud." She shrugged.

"My luck, I guess," she said. "Position opened up, I volunteered; the previous Gatewarden's doing time in Aspen – rumor is it was the same investigation that got Rawne killed." She enveloped Cornelius in her cold stare. "You heard anything on the powdervine about how Rawne died?"

He shook his head. "No," he truthed with extreme precision. "You?"

She shrugged. "Rumor says it was a Judge – blew him up with a grenade."

Cornelius nodded judiciously – just how much did she really know? "Dirty?" he asked.

She looked at him like he was stupid. "Why else would Rawne be investigating him?" she asked.

Cornelius gave a one-shouldered shrug. "I guess," he admitted. "I'm sorry; I know you two were close."

She furrowed her brow. "Not particularly," she said. "I mean, he was helping me but . . ." Her voice trailed off as he pointed at her boot where the skull-pomelled dagger was sheathed.

"Isn't that his bootknife?" he asked. The bequest of personal weapons was not uncommon among Judges – with the exception of lawgivers, of course – and it seemed perfectly reasonable Rawne's protege would have ended up with his blade. Hawkridge nodded, smiled.

"Yes, yes it is," she said easily. She drew her foot back, behind the curtain of the hem of her cloak. "I guess he was . . ." Her words fumbled to silence. "I should probably stop carrying it," she opined. "If I'm not considering the SJS, I mean," she explained. "It might give the wrong impression."

Cornelius shrugged. "Nothing wrong with having aspirations, Kris," he told her. "And no harm in remembering a friend – heck, I'd carry Novak's daystick if anything happened to her."

Hawkridge laughed – he still didn't care for it. "They'll encase that in boing and put it in the Hall of Heroes," she joked. Cornelius grinned.

"True enough," he admitted. He glanced at his chronometer. "I'd love to stay and chat," he said, "but I've got to bounce – I need to make Big Tri by this evening." Hawkridge nodded and keyed a couple of buttons on her bike's screen.

"You should be fine," she said. "Weather report is clear – no major storms predicted, radiation level is medium. Your authorization for Big Tri via the Toledo Highway is good." She glanced up and allowed herself a very small, yet slightly bitter and fragile, smile. "Although with level seven you could have signed this yourself," she said. He shrugged with embarrassed modesty. "Alright, the questions I have to ask; have you taken your rad-binders, following the dosing instructions for mass and body fat percentage?"

He nodded. "I have."

She glanced up at him, running her expert glance over him, her eyes cool with professional appraisal. "With your muscle density," she said, "I would advise a sonic massage to cleanse any lingering radiation toxicity when you reach Big Tri. It doesn't leave lean tissue as easily as it does lipids; don't want it depositing out in your bloodstream or bone marrow." He smiled his thanks as she continued. "You are aware that while the road is Mega City One territory and you are required to uphold your judicial oath while on it – and that violations of the oath, The Law, or failure to abide by or uphold same may result in Special Judicial Service investigation – the Justice Department cannot and will not guarantee back up, assistance or projection to anyone – Judge, citizen or alien – on the highway?" Cornelius smirked at the long-winded legal precision.

"I have been so advised," he said. "What's the practical skinny on that?"

She shrugged. "Practical skinny is you're on your own out there," she said, "use your own judgment. It's pretty much a temporary Long Walk – enforce what you want, ignore what you need. SJS is less interested in seeing you in Aspen than they are _not_ seeing you in resyk. Officially, judicial authority and responsibility extend to the road and not beyond – but, unofficially . . ." Her voice trailed off, as if to avoid saying something she shouldn't. He nodded.

"Gotcha," he said. "Any action I should know about?"

Hawkridge shook her head. "Nothing in particular J-Dept is aware of," she said, "but you're the first Judge to take the highway for a couple of months – I'd speak to a caravan guard if I were you."

"I was about to ask about that," Cornelius said. "I'd like to ride in convoy if I can – strength in numbers and all that, help protect some trade, you know?" Her sensual lips twisted into an amused holly leaf.

"That's why you're driving, not flying, isn't it?" she asked with a grin. "Level seven could have got you a zonejumper – but you thought it was your duty to play outrider?" He didn't answer, simply looking at her levelly. She shook her head. "Good old JC," she chuckled, "always the boy-scout."

"Flash the bronze," he said tightly.

His idealism and seriousness embarrassed her despite herself. "Hell," she admitted, "I shouldn't mock. If more Judges were like you we'd need less of us. You're a credit to the Street, JC," she said sincerely.

Something about the way she said it caught Cornelius' ear. "'Us'?" he asked.

"Judges," she said shortly, with a slightly sickly smile. "If more were better, we'd need fewer, you know?" She turned in the saddle and pointed. "The beige eighteen-wheeler with the red stripe?" she said. She looked down at her screen and tabbed a couple of controls. "That's a Bethlehem Plasteen transport bound for Big Tri, scheduled to leave at noon. It's not a caravan, just a single truck, but there are two outriders with it. Mercs, not corporate solos – you don't mind muties, do you?" she asked carefully. "You see a lot of them on the wall – they aren't allowed in the city unrestricted, of course, but out here . . ." Her voice trailed off once again; probably for the same reason.

Cornelius gave a humorless smile. "Not at all," he assured her. "Some of my best friends are divergent." Hawkridge laughed – now, it was truly unwelcome.

"Very politically correct, JC," she said, "but the highway don't care about your politeness; on the wall and beyond that ain't the word." She pointed. "Girl with the purple hair by the big bike – she's a stront, name's Harley. Got a good rep, no priors, no warrants, knows the terrain better than anyone." Hawkridge gave a suggestive smile. "Rumor is she likes her guys meaty – go turn on the charm and you'll have her eating out of your hand."

Cornelius just glared at her – what kind of drokking game was she playing? "Is it just that she's a mutie," he asked acidly, "or is there some other reason you think she's a slut?" The implied insult of him didn't even rise to the level of acknowledgment.

Hawkridge looked at him with incurious puzzlement. "She's female," she said blandly, "and she ain't blind." She shrugged. "I'm just trying to give you some leverage – you don't want to shake what Grud gave you? Be my guest; stick your helmet back on and go flash the bronze," she said dismissively. "See how far it gets you with a _divergence_."

Cornelius looked at her for a long second, and then nodded, turning to walk back to his bike. "Thank you, Gatewarden," he said shortly, mounting up and firing the engine.

Regret flared in her, coupled with lack of understanding – really, what had she said? Stronts frakked like rad-rabbits – everyone knew that – and a womutie like Harley wouldn't be above doing the nasty to get what she wanted. Cornelius had to believe that. "JC!" she called after him. "Wait . . . !"

Her voice was drowned out by the noise of the bike, Cornelius flashing her a cursory salute as he peeled off the ramp, driving towards the staging area and the big beige rig with the red stripe. She snorted and shook her head, sliding her helmet back on and drawing the cloak around her body once more. Level seven and a divisional appointment? She guessed it was easy to get that if you were prepared to spout the words the desk-jockeys in CapZone expected you to. "Less flashing the bronze and more polishing it," she muttered derisively to herself.

It was a mark of just how suited she was for SJS that she almost believed it.

**A /n :** This is an odd story, in many ways. I am gradually establishing relationships, character interactions, and doing world-building in my "Dredd" fanon. This story is, in many ways, utterly superfluous to the overarching narrative of my stories – mostly, it introduces characters and engages in world-building; although there will be a central plot revelation which will prove semi-important later on (but not _that_ important!)

Really, this story was just an excuse to write something I wanted to write . . . the entire plot ("Cornelius travels to Big Tri") could have been handled with a single line in another fic ("You got here then – excellent" or something like that!) But . . . I wanted to write the story . . . it allows me to explore the Cursed Earth, the boundary wall, even my notion of robots in "Dredd" (I am writing them less as sentient machines with personalities and more as dedicated computers which give the illusion of being able to engage in human interaction – although as the story progresses, you might see more 'personality' for machines; but this is likely an illusion caused by clever programming.)

Come on – you've read this far; might as well leave a review. The box is right underneath here – just type what you thought and submit it. Will take you a minute, tops.


	2. Harley

**Prog 2 : Harley**

Cornelius kept a respectful distance from the big bike Hawkridge had pointed out as belonging to the woman she'd called Harley; Judges weren't really, despite appearances, part of the biker culture of Mega City One and the open highways of the Cursed Earth, but that didn't stop him understanding their delicate possessiveness. It was a custom model, based on the well-respected Routerunner 500, but with extensive modifications to the chassis, wheels and tires to give it better off-road capabilities. The engine had been upgraded, too – eight cylinders, perhaps in or nearing the two liter range, probably with the option to run full, or in six- or four cylinder modes. The frame, forks and engine block were mirror-shiny with polished ultrachrome, the fairings airbrushed with swirling quasi-tribal designs in black and metallic green. The seat was padded and comfortable-looking as a favorite armchair, with big panniers behind it – necessary for someone who lived in the saddle. A shotgun and heavy pistol were holstered on the front fairing, secured with electronic locking mechanisms that would only deactivate when outside the boundary wall.

The owner of the bike was nowhere to be seen, but Cornelius didn't need to speak with her immediately – his first port of call was the driver of the rig. He eased his bike to a stop beneath the high cab and called upwards. "Hey, you leaving at noon?"

A head poked itself out of the window, glancing casually downwards – the driver looked bored, but as soon as he saw the Judge below him he started and ducked back into the cab. The door opened and he hopped smartly down. "Yes, Judge," he said, a little nervously. "There's no problem, is there? Border-control gave me the okay for Big Tri."

Cornelius smiled and shook his head – even people who had nothing to hide were nervous around Judges, and he could see or sense nothing that made him think there was anything more than that here. "No problem, citizen," he promised him. "You want some company on the road?"

"Sir?" the driver asked. He was bulky, dressed in slightly-greasy orange overalls, his face jowly and unshaven, his gut bulging over his belt – the very image of the long-distance hauler only working because both his company and the Justice Department didn't quite trust the AutoDrive system with several tons of vehicular potential-carnage traveling at over one hundred miles an hour.

"I'm going to Big Tri myself," Cornelius explained. "Better to ride in convoy, and I thought you might appreciate another outrider." The driver didn't look quite convinced, but certainly looked as if he wanted to look convinced. "Trust me," Cornelius assured him, "this ain't a trap op, there's no investigation – if there were, I'd have run your plates and asked for your ID. Now," he continued, "am I welcome or not?"

The driver looked both mollified and guilty. "It's a free road, Judge," he said. "I'd be glad of the company – and I'm sure BethPlast would be, too. But, check with Harley, wilya?" he pleaded. He pointed and Cornelius turned. "Girl with the cute swagger and the spug-kicker boots?" the driver continued. "Her and Indian are my outriders – she's in charge." Cornelius glanced at Harley, getting an immediate impression of her – tall, well-built, rocking the Brit-Punk aesthetic and with a swagger that was more than cute if you liked your girls Dok-may-care. Her boots probably cost more than most citizens made in a month. Cornelius turned back to the driver. "I'm sure she'll won't have any problems, but she'd like to be asked, you know?" He realized he perhaps sounded a little familiar and gulped as he blushed. "I mean . . ."

Cornelius nodded. "Got it," he said. "I'll go talk to her now." He got off his bike and walked back towards where Harley was putting some purchases – bottles of flavored water, a few vacuum-sealed snacks – into her bike's panniers, her back to him. Seen from behind, slightly bent over, her narrow waist, wide hips and muscular thighs were accentuated by the form-fitting radsuit and ribcage-length bolero jacket with the Brit-Cit flag sequined on the back. "Harley?" he asked.

She spoke as she was turning. "Who wants to . . . ?" she began, and then clapped her mouth shut as she saw him. "I'm sorry, Judge," she said with immediate worried sincerity. Her broad shoulders slumped and she looked down, withdrawing into herself, trying to appear submissive. Moving slowly and obviously, she lifted her hands off her bike, keeping them innocently open and empty. She took the lapel of her jacket in two fingers and pulled it open, reaching inside just as delicately. "I have my papers here . . ." she began.

Cornelius narrowed his eyes – he didn't care for her cowed reaction to his innocent and (he hoped) friendly question. "Gatewarden make any trouble for you, _miss_?" he asked, the emphasis on the unnecessary politeness. She shook her head.

"No, Sir," she assured him, a little too-briskly.

"Lying to a Judge is an offense," he reminded her. Both of them winced as he said it, but for different reasons.

"No more than is expected, Sir," she admitted. She drew out a plastic-sheathed trifold document. "My papers, Sir," she said, holding them out to him. "I have class III city authorization," she continued nervously. "I am permitted within the staging area of a boundary wall gate while hired by a corporation trading within Mega City One. I am currently under contract with . . ."

He stepped forward, abruptly angry, and snatched the papers from her hand. He didn't open them, instead tucking them a little roughly back inside her jacket pocket. He thrust out his hand to her. "Judge John Cornelius," he said firmly. "I'm driving to Big Tri. I want to ride with you – driver said I should ask you if that was okay. Said you were in charge."

"Oh!" she exclaimed, her slit-pupilled eyes wide. The nervousness left her exotic face and was replaced by a careful wariness. Her cheekbones and brow were wider than normal, her nose slightly flattened, her skin made up of thousands of almost-metallic brass-colored scales, ranging from the size of a finger-nail to that of a grain of sand. She ran a gloved hand through her spiked purple pixie-cut – it was impossible to tell if it was her natural color or a dye job, as she had no eyebrows to compare it to – and roved her gaze over him. She opened her mouth and ran a long, forked, black tongue between needle-sharp fangs, biting her blue-glossed lower lip thoughtfully. She took his hand. "Mackenzie Quin," she said – there was a hint of reminiscing in her voice. "Friends call me Harley."

"May _I_ call you Harley, Miss Quin?" Cornelius asked.

She shrugged – something of what he presumed was her natural bravado returning. "Probably with more right than a lot of people who do," she said. She sighed and realized she might have insulted him by presuming the worst. "I'm sorry, Judge," she said. "About just now – I shouldn't have thought you would . . . not that I'm ever unjustly treated, nor would I ever complain, you understand," she added quickly. "It's just that . . ."

"I get it," said Cornelius. "No need to apologize and – for what it's worth – I'm sorry." Although they were entitled to the protection of The Law, Mega City One practiced mutant apartheid and prejudice against them was common, even (perhaps _especially_, given the disproportionate amount of crime committed by them) among Judges. Cornelius wasn't immune to it; although J-Dept lived by statistics, and – once you corrected for income-level, education, priors and all the rest – muties were no more likely to commit crimes than norms, anecdotes were damnably convincing. He wondered just what his reaction would have been if Harley hadn't looked no less-normal than a citizen caught-up in some wacky biosculpting craze, if she hadn't had that voluptuously muscular figure undisguised by the skin-tight tiger-striped radsuit and accentuated by the well-chosen black leather jacket, belt and boots, if the mutations in her mouth and throat had given her more of a speech impediment than her actually-cute sibilant lisp. He wondered how he would have acted if he hadn't met Anderson, or if Hawkridge hadn't put him on edge with her slurs and presumptions.

He wasn't sure he liked the answer, or what it revealed about him.

She nodded. "Thanks," she said with feeling. "Sure you can ride with us – we'd welcome it. You been to Big Tri before?"

"Well, yes," admitted Cornelius, "but never on the road – you got time to teach me what I should know?"

She laughed – a ululating hissing sound – and grinned unguardedly; Cornelius supposed she was more comfortable with him, or just so amused she wasn't paying attention. Regardless, her mouth widened unnaturally, revealing her teeth back to what would have been molars if she'd had anything other than fangs. Despite his best efforts, shock must have shown on his face, because pain flashed in her venom-green eyes and her lips pursed into a puckered blue rose. "I'm sure you can handle yourself just fine, Judge," she said shortly.

The tension in her stance was obvious – the hurt of a woman who'd thought she was accepted and then had the rug abruptly ripped from under her feet as she realized she would and could never, truly, be by a _norm_. The ugly sentiment she'd tried so hard to reject but never could came back to her; _normal is what everyone else is and you are not_.

Cornelius mentally kicked himself for not controlling his reaction better. Really, what right did he – not only normal, but actively _handsome_ – have to be horrified by her deformities? "I'm sorry," he said. "It startled me, that's all – I didn't expect . . ."

"Because the rest of it could be make-up, right?" she asked acidly. She breathed in deeply, controlling her emotions with an effort. Cornelius opened his mouth to speak again, but she shook her head – perhaps remembering that, even if he were kind and compassionate and understanding, he was still a Judge and not someone she should sass so badly. "No," she said, "it's okay – I get it. I really do. I'm just so used to being out there . . ." She shrugged. "Highway don't care," she explained. "If you're a guy or a girl, mutie or norm – even Judge or perp. It's just about how you drive. In the city, I sometimes forget it's different."

"I don't want you to think you have to remember," Cornelius said.

She bit her lip and hung her head, nodding slowly. She looked like she might have spoken, but they were interrupted by a glutinous voice coming from near the automats. "Hey, Harley!"

Cornelius turned to see a bulky figure waddling over, a greasy munce-and-tatters pasty in a presspulp sleeve in one massive hand. He was a few inches taller than Harley, solid with layers of muscle and fat, his midsection girthy. He was wearing leather chaps over well-worn jeans, dusty boots repaired with military-grade silvercloth tape and a black T-shirt with a band logo. Cornelius wasn't an expert, and he couldn't see the logo too-well because of the cannibalized and patchwork armor vest over the T-shirt, but he was pretty sure the band was Acheron – one of Dredd's favorites. His mentor appreciated good guitar work, as surprising as that might seem.

He came to stand next to Harley, draping one thick, tattooed arm around her shoulders with a mixture of protection and possessiveness. "Any problems, babe?" he asked, his eyes fixed on Cornelius. "Well, Judge?" he asked belligerently. "Any problems?" He looked strong, but slow – weighed down with too-much fat over unlean muscle. His black beard was thick and unkempt, his head shaven, drops of sweat beading on his scalp.

Cornelius considered what to do – there wasn't a firm protocol for this kind of situation, certainly not in a boundary wall staging area, but the usual (and recommended) procedure was a precise use of violence to remind the posturing individual of his place. It would be an easy thing to break a nose with a punch, snap a kneecap with a kick or use the handle of an undeployed daystick for a crippling gutshot.

Cornelius did nothing – after all, it was him who'd been the jerk to Harley. He shook his head, but Harley spoke before he could.

"It's fine, Indian," she said brusquely, shaking his arm off her shoulder with a very slight shudder. She actually stepped forward, coming to stand next to Cornelius. "And quit pawing me like I'm a lump of munce, wilya?"

Indian's brows drew together, the wrinkles in his forehead shining with sweat in the morning sun. He looked embarrassed and confused, and – as he glanced at Cornelius – even jealous. "Don't be like that, babe," he said. "I'm just trying to look out for you."

"And don't call me 'babe'!" hissed Harley. She shook her head. "The Judge and I were just _talking_, for Grud's sake! He's . . ." She glanced over at Cornelius, running her gaze over him thoughtfully. "He's riding to Big Tri," she said eventually. "Offered to ride with us."

Indian slowly turned to face Cornelius, folding his arms and settling his feet more comfortably. "Don't know if we need the help," he said obstinately. "And I don't like people messing with Harley."

"Neither do I," said Cornelius with a faint smile that didn't reach his eyes, "so I'll let you off with a warning – don't lay hands on her without her permission again or I'll have you doing six months inside a 'cube for unwanted sexual contact." Indian glowered, but Harley actually laughed, lifting her hand to hide her gaping mouth.

"The big lunk's fine, Judge," she assured him. "He doesn't mean anything by it – he's just over-protective. And neither of us need the trouble," she pleaded, directing her words at both of them. Indian didn't look convinced. "Drop it, wilya?" she asked urgently. "He's going to ride with us, okay?" she said. He didn't respond. "_Okay_, Indian?" she repeated, more forcibly, locking eyes with her subordinate.

Indian set his jaw in the adult male equivalent of a petulant pout. He looked Cornelius up and down, tried not to be too obvious about sucking in his substantial gut and standing a little straighter, brushing crumbs of pastry and spots of grease out of his beard. "Harley and I'll ride ahead of the rig," he told him. "You can hang back with Big Dan." Harley shook her head.

"Uh-nuh," she said. "You'll stay back; Judge and I'll ride up front." Indian's scowl deepened and he looked back and forth between the two of them, his eyes showing betrayal. Harley hissed in exasperation. "This ain't personal," she assured her partner, "Judges' bikes have better sensors – makes sense for him to be up front. You protect the rig. With a lawmaster as eyes and ears, not to mention black-and-bronze keeping the small fry away, we can make better time – we can be in Big Tri by fifteen-hundred, easy." She held Indian's gaze until he nodded and looked away, embarrassed but not happy. She turned to Cornelius. "You cool with that, Judge?" she asked.

Cornelius nodded. "Sounds good to me," he said. "You think it'll be quiet?" She shrugged.

"Like I said, bandits'll think twice before tangling with a Judge," Harley explained, "and the rig ain't carrying anything particularly valuable to them – prefab plasteen girders and fasteners. Can't eat 'em, heavy to transport, hard to sell. Still, we might get to see some action. Hope not, though," she added.

"Amen to that," agreed Cornelius. "Comms?"

"We use channel blue-42," Indian said – he sounded professional and engaged, something Cornelius was glad about; he didn't need jealousy and bruised egos causing childish friction. "It's generally pretty quiet – not a lot of interference, and it works well at those ranges. Unless you want to use something else?" Cornelius shook his head, already tabbing his lawscreen to set his radio. "Call signs are obvious – Harley, Indian, Big Dan. What's yours?"

Cornelius shrugged. He considered telling them to use his old Academy nickname, but decided against it. "_Judge_'ll do fine," he said shortly.

Harley grinned. "How imaginative," she remarked dryly.

Cornelius chuckled. "It's about three hundred miles; any stops planned, or do you want to eat in Big Tri?" he asked.

Harley shook her head. "No stops," she said, "and I'd love to eat in Big Tri – but they don't let me sit at the counter and I'll be drokked before I give them the satisfaction," she added bitterly. She gave a short, dismissive shrug. "No biggie," she assured him. "We'll double back to Toledo when we're done – we've got another run starting there tomorrow morning, so we'll eat and spend the night there. I've got some snacks for the road." She suddenly wondered if the Judge was as seasoned a traveler as he should be. "Are you going to be okay," she asked, "or will you need to eat?"

Cornelius shook his head, tapped a pouch on his thigh. "Got some nutrient pills, glucose tabs and stims if I need it," he said, "but I'll be fine – big breakfast this morning with my mother," he explained. Harley laughed, but it was more with amazement than amusement.

"Do Judges _have_ mothers?" she hissed, her mouth agape. Cornelius twisted his lips into a wry grin.

"The lucky ones do, Harley," he remarked. Her smile crumpled back into reminiscing softness.

At that moment, a siren sounded overhead and a robotic voice called out; "Caravans for noon departures prepare for egress. Pittsburgh Gate will be opening in two minutes. Citizens are reminded that the Cursed Earth is a radioactive wasteland. Caravans for noon departures prepare for egress." Harley swung herself into the saddle.

"Alright, time to move," she said, reaching behind her to lift a golden lion's-head helmet from where it hung on the panniers. There was a shield on the crown, nestled amid the sculpted curls of the mane; five-sided, with the flag of Brit-Cit enameled in bright red, white and blue. She slipped it on, the brassy scales of her face blending into it even as she stared out of the mouth. Indian moved to his own bike – a big black-and-chrome long-forked hog with high handlebars, a belt-fed rifle holstered alongside the front wheel with the ammo feed reaching back to a box in the rear. He hauled himself onto it, moving less easily than Harley did and looking far less appealing as he swung his ham-sized thighs and wide buttocks over the seat.

Cornelius jogged to his own bike, slipping his helmet on as he did so. He checked the straps holding his duffelbag to the rack over the rear wheel, making sure it was securely fastened before mounting. He fired the engine and eased forward, catching up with Harley as she slotted her bike into place in front of the rig. Indian hung back, his engine idling alongside the truck. The rig roared into life, a sound felt more than heard through the very tarmac of the staging area, and an airhorn honked as Big Dan tested it. Harley glanced over at Cornelius, her gaping grin seeming to take up most of the helmet's opening, and held her fist out to him. He smiled and reached out, bumping their fists together. She revved her engine, eager for the off. "Sound off on comms for BethPlast caravan on blue-42," she said. "Harley."

"Indian," came the voice in Cornelius earpiece.

"Big Dan." The driver honked the airhorn again as he spoke.

"Judge." He tabbed a couple of controls on the screen above his lawmaster's fuel tank, setting the bike's sensors and software to automatically analyze the radio signals, radar reports and other information to build unique profiles for each of the elements in the convoy, all the better to locate them out there if something went wrong.

The siren sounded again and the robotic voice said, "Pittsburgh Gate will open in ten seconds. Citizens are encouraged to have a nice day. Pittsburgh Gate is opening. Stand clear, please – interference with boundary wall operations carries a mandatory minimum sentence of three years in the iso-cubes." Ahead of them, the blastdoors opened and the bridge extended, clanking on well-oiled hydraulics. The tunnel yawned open – lights running either side of the tarmac and along the ridge of the arched roof. At the far end – a hundred yards or more away – the pale, washed out sunlight of the Cursed Earth could be seen.

Harley glanced around – no other caravans, rigs or even individual vehicles were preparing to leave. "Looks like it's just us, boys," she said. She rolled her shoulders and settled herself more comfortably onto her bike, glancing over her shoulder at the bright bulk of the city looming like a dream behind her. "They don't know what they're missing," she remarked wistfully. She twisted her wrist and her bike sped forward, its powerful engine howling. Cornelius followed after her a splintered-second later, Big Dan leaning on the air horn as he moved forward with Indian keeping pace behind him.

The two lead bikes entered the tunnel, road markings and lights whipping past as they accelerated through it, and then they were clear of the archway, over the bridge and onto the black asphalt of the feed road, taking the gentle quarter-mile curve that merged into the Cursed Earth highway proper. The boundary wall, the city and security were behind them, and ahead of them was the open road, Toledo and – ultimately – Big Tri.

**A / n :** It's a topic explored in the comics, and alluded to in the movie, and I thought the idea of mutant prejudice would be an interesting one to explore (even if only vaguely) as a metaphor for racism. Readers will be able to notice, particularly, references to the contemporary African-American experience with law enforcement, as well as historical references.

Harley and Indian are named after two brands of American motorcycle (immortalized in Roxette's song "Harleys and Indians" - my very first, very bad, "Judge Dredd" fanfic had a lot of Roxette references in and so this is a kind of self-referential shout out!) I don't know why Indian is called "Indian" - but Harley's nickname is obvious as her name is Quin.

The reference to Acheron is from Darth Gilthoron's "The Cursed Earth" story (available on this site); they are a band from the 2070s, and Dredd likes them quite a bit. I believe Darth Gilthoron made them up – they are not canonical.

Alright, you've read this far – why not review? Seriously – the box is _right there!_ Just type what you thought of the story in and submit the review. If you log in or leave another way for me to get in touch with you, I'll not only write back to thank you but will also review one of your stories!


	3. The Cuyahoga Broodlords

**Prog 3 : The Cuyahoga Broodlords**

"_I went back to Ohio  
but my pretty countryside  
had been paved down the middle  
by a government that had no pride . . ."_

"My City Was Gone" ~ The Pretenders

When President Robert "Bad Bob" Booth began the Atomic Wars of 2070, the cities were protected from the worst of the ICBMs and MIRVs by their laser defense systems. Along the eastern seaboard of America the center of the Bos-Wash northeast megalopolis, the organically-accreted precursor to Mega City One, survived virtually unscathed, although the outlying areas took significant damage, getting worse the further one got from what would become CapZone. A localized failure (or, perhaps, as was whispered in the early days of the war, a deliberate sabotage by Booth's men to clip the claws of the wolfpacks of Wall Street) left key areas of New York unprotected, resulting in the shattered ruins of Radhattan.

The great rebuilding and recovery led by the Judges was an exercise in pragmatic sacrifice and consolidation – both of land and people. Boundaries were drawn, in some places almost arbitrarily, and walls built on top of them. The end result was Mega City One. Judicial squads scoured the land outside the walls, forcibly relocating citizens and resources within the conurbation. Whatever refused to come, or was deemed unnecessary or unwanted – people, materiel, entire towns and cities – was abandoned to the new wilderness of the Cursed Earth.

The Cursed Earth was often called a rad-desert, but this was not – for the most part – technically or even popularly accurate. Rainfall was relatively common in areas that were formerly temperate, although it was for the most part acidic, toxic and utterly unfit for human consumption. The polluted air, water and earth killed flora and fauna, and what it did not kill it stunned and mutated – the once-verdant prairies, great fields of waving wheat and fruited plains were reduced to a blasted, scorched scrub-land of red ocher smeared with gray, the surface cracked and torn like broken plaster. With the grass and trees gone, the earth could not hold the water. This side of the Rockies, it drained swiftly away into the once-mighty, now-sludgy Mississippi River, flowing in a thick stream of steaming, radioactive runoff down to Lake Louisiana just east of Texas City.

The polluted waterways and rainfall that could dissolve plasteen put paid to the technical definition of desert, and the presence of ruins, wrecked cities, abandoned towns and even settlements showed the popular definition – that of a featureless wasteland, untouched by the hand or hubris of man – was wrong, too. Within a dozen or so miles of the boundary walls the ground had been cleared, leaving killing fields the defenses of Mega City One could use to their advantage in the event of a mutant assault on the city, but beyond that distance the ruins still stood, only demolished by cannibalization for shanty towns and other dwellings, scoured down by the sandstorms and time.

All of this history and geography went through Cornelius' mind as he and Harley led the small convoy out of the Pittsburgh Gate and onto the Big Tri highway. The highway ran laser straight as far as the eye could see, west-by-north-west, as directly towards Toledo as a cruise missile. Three lanes in each direction, two separate roadways of thick blacktop built on a ten-foot tall earth and rock embankment, the walls built of interlocking, prefabricated slabs of concrete.

Cornelius accelerated to an easy one-hundred-twenty-five miles an hour – well-within the performance envelope of the lawmaster, comfortable for Harley's bike and a reasonable cruise for the rig. At that speed, the leveled killing fields ringing the city were behind him in five minutes, and the Cursed Earth proper opened before them. It was only a few minutes later they crossed the Big Smelly – what had once been called the Ohio River – the water low and sluggish in the summer heat, the stench nauseating as the sludge lapped at the columns of the bridge.

There was little chatter on the radio for the first half-hour of the journey – here, the road ran through what had once been mostly farmland, and ruins were sparse. The radar on Cornelius' lawmaster showed nothing of interest – a few unidentified returns at a safe distance both north and south of the road, but nothing particularly threatening. The Geiger counter reported a low rad level, but the earth was scorched to dry dust by the scouring wind. Here and there, the soil of the once-fertile fields was blown away, revealing the fissured bedrock of the plateau.

"Eyes sharp, Judge." Harley's voice broke the silence. Ahead of them ruins reared on either side of the highway – blasted and shattered by atomic strikes, jagged fingers of crumbing concrete and rusting steel reaching into the scrubbed blue sky. "If there's any action to be had, it'll be here." Cornelius tabbed a few controls on his bike's screen, accessing J-Dept's intelligence on this area. Lasers projected it on the inside of his visor, information floating in front of him as he watched the destroyed urban area approach.

The ruined city ahead had been the Cleveland-Akron-Canton conurbation, one of many cities dispassionately sacrificed and left outside the walls by the Judges. The unmutated citizens had been relocated – many forcibly – with the divergent left to fend for themselves in the post-atomic horror that northern Ohio quickly became. For the last three decades, marauding gangs of bandits and crazed mutants, led by deluded religious leaders and petty warlords, had raided each other for food and clean water, land, women to rape, and even just amusement. Cornelius eased back on the throttle as Harley did the same, slowing to a mere ton of speed. He shifted his thumb and flipped the safety off the bike cannon, scrolling through the data displayed on his HUD with the other hand. "Which is the bigger threat?" he asked Harley. "The Canton Slicers or the Cuyahoga Broodlords?" Harley gave her hissing laugh.

"I've got a womb," she said, "so I might be biased, but the rape gangs have been more active – they've pushed their territory south, perhaps even across the highway. But we should be through to the Medina dropdown in thirty minutes," she added. "I doubt they'll hit us." Cornelius nodded grimly.

"Almost seems a pity," he muttered. "Heard some bad stories about 'em."

"Oh," Harley assured him, "they're _all_ true."

As she spoke, she and Cornelius were driving into the ruins. Abruptly, visibility on either side of the road was curtailed, reduced by the twisted wreckage of the cities. The ground immediately bordering the highway was a barren desert of concrete clinker, smashed by demolition robots when the highway was constructed, but further out the ruins reared upwards, providing ample hiding places for bandits and muties. "Stay sharp . . ." Harley repeated.

A warning flashed in Cornelius' visor. "I have hard returns on the satellite uplink," he reported calmly. "North of the highway, two miles ahead. Twenty, no, correction, twenty-two contacts. Thermal imaging suggests bikes and ATVs, one medium vehicle." He scrolled through data, flicking through screens of information. "No radar read possible, and satellite coverage has low granularity." He considered for a second. "I'm going to eyeball it; throttle down, let's buy some time."

Harley didn't sound annoyed he was giving orders – she'd kind of expected, and even gratefully welcomed, it. She had nothing on her bike which would have warned her; if it were an ambush, she'd have blundered right into it. "Confirm," she said, easing back and tapping the brakes. "You get that, Big Dan? Indian, watch our tail – most likely it's nothing but I don't want those bastards coming up our ass." She hissed a laugh at her own crude joke.

"Ten-four, Harley," Big Dan replied.

"Nothing I can see back here," Indian reported – his voice was strangely muffled, likely as he twisted in his seat to look around him. "I'll keep 'em peeled, though."

Cornelius opened the throttle and leaned into his bike, accelerating to one-fifty as he snapped open the thumb-break on his lawgiver's holster. The wind whipping past would steal his voice away before it could activate the gun, but – seated on his lawmaster with his helmet on – all the systems were slaved together and so he did not worry. He read the satellite data, reporting back to Harley. "Contacts are approaching, range approximately one mile. They are crossing the highway – I have visual." Ahead of him he could see a soft-skinned flatbed truck with a machine-gun mounted in the rear lumber onto the road – earthwork ramps had been built up the embankments on either side. The truck was flanked by a few bikes and ATVs, each ridden by a gun-toting warrior. One of them saw Cornelius approaching and pointed, waving his hands excitedly. A couple of shots rang out, one bouncing off the lawmaster's fairing, as the bandits on the back of the truck fumbled to bring the machine-gun to bear. "Targets are hostile," Cornelius said grimly. "Engaging." As he spoke, his visorcam read the iconography daubed on the panels of the truck and fairings of the bikes – a crude (in both senses of the word) image of a pregnant woman being bred from behind – and flashed a report on the HUD. "Confirming Broodlords," he said tightly – not that it really mattered, he supposed. "Hi-ex," he ordered his pistol.

"Roger that," said Harley as Cornelius drew and fired in a single smooth motion. The specialty munition hit the flank of the truck, detonating inside the transmission and flipping it in the air with a ear-splitting roar and blossoming fireball. "Moving forward to assist. Indian, Dan – hang back until we've cleared it," she ordered, twisting the accelerator. She reached down and drew her shotgun as her bike leaped forward.

Ahead of her was delicious chaos – Cornelius hadn't slowed, simply barreling through the expanding cloud of flaming fuel, firing to his left and right, felling a biker with each shot. He was twenty yards past them before he holstered his hot gun, applying the brakes and whipping his bike around with a squeal of burning rubber to stop dead and face the way he'd come. Harley fired her longarm one-handed, blasting an ATV rider off his vehicle in a welter of limbs. She spun the gun, flip-cocking it, and blasted again, speeding through the disoriented bandits and the remains of the explosion.

She did not slow and turn as dramatically as Cornelius – she was riding single-handed and her bike lacked the sophisticated computer-controlled power steering and gyroscopic stabilization of his. As she zoomed past him, he drew his widowmaker and snapped a grim command to his lawmaster. "Bike! Autofire!"

The lawmaster's cannons opened up with a barking, staccato roar, systematically gunning down the Broodlords on the highway. They screamed and involuntarily danced, their limbs twitching even as they were blown off. Cornelius held the J-Dept shotgun above his head, the inline camera feeding what it 'saw' into his visor, allowing him to clear the earthwork ramp without exposing his head or torso to return fire. The Broodlords were trying to respond, but the Judge's sudden assault was too much for them – they were panicking, flailing for weapons, getting in each other's way. The air was bloodslick and thick with cordite and screams, what could be seen of Cornelius' face beneath the helmet grim-set and focused.

Harley spun her bike and sped forward, riding towards the edge of the highway, firing and cocking, firing and cocking as she did so. She tossed her shotgun to the ground as it ran dry, snatching up her pistol as she dismounted, walking down the earthwork ramp, administering coups de grace to wounded Broodlords. Behind her, Cornelius lowered the widowmaker and shucked the part-empty magazine, slotting in into the bike's autoloader to be refilled and accepting the fresh one it offered. He swept his head, surveying his surroundings and reading the radar report as he slammed the magazine home.

There was single Broodlord left standing, running on foot south, one arm hanging limp with a bleeding shoulder wound. He was zig-zagging, coming close to ducking into the ruins. Cornelius holstered the widowmaker and drew his lawgiver. "Hotshot," he said dispassionately, firing twice as the bandit darted around a corner. The two heatseaker rounds – locked onto the raider's thermal signature – weaved and jinked themselves, and vanished around the same corner. Cornelius didn't wait to hear them hit – he turned back to the highway, holstering his pistol. "Clear!" he yelled as the bandit's icon went black on his HUD.

Harley, her pistol held in two hands, swept her gaze over the raiders at her feet. The earth of the ramp was soaked with blood, chewed up by running tires and shotgun blasts. It and the tarmac of the highway were strewn with dead bandits and ruined vehicles. Seen this close, they were pathetic – most scrawny and sickly-looking, bald and covered in sores, the signs of rad-poisoning clear on them, dressed in rags and corroded armor, their weapons looking more dangerous to themselves than their enemies. Their bikes were rusting wrecks, cannibalized from scrapped vehicles, metal rusting and repairs made with tape and string. Harley gathered the saliva in her mouth and spat accurately on the face of one of the raiders – his eyes were open, staring blankly at nothing. "Disgusting creatures," she muttered. She picked up her shotgun and marched back to her bike. "Come through slowly, Big Dan," she ordered. "And drop the cow-catcher – there's debris on the highway." She reloaded the gun, pushing the individual shells home with fastidious care, and then holstered it once more.

_Debris._ Despite himself, Cornelius couldn't repress a shudder as the rig eased forward, shoving the corpses and wrecks aside. The highway was slick with spilled oil and fuel, the burning carcass of the truck lying on its side. This wholesale slaughter – which is what it had been, there was no other way to describe it – had been the single largest loss of life he'd been part of. He'd personally resolved a hostage situation in sector 119 – gunning down three, silently knifing two and snapping the neck of the ringleader – and, during the pacification of a block war (in which he'd fought and earned a commendation under the stern gaze of Hershey), he'd cleared a command-post single-handed, executing eight rebellious CitiDef officers. But there were nearly thirty corpses – cooling or burning – littering the highway; Harley couldn't have killed more than a dozen, and he must have fatally wounded at least a few of those. His bike had cut down a lot of them, but that was as much a machine as his lawgiver or widowmaker – it had just done what he told it. _Guns don't judge people_, he reflected, _Judges judge people._

Indian drove slowly alongside the rig, nodding with approval as he surveyed the carnage. "Nice work, Judge," he said admiringly. "I'd like to have seen it." Cornelius gave a short, thin smile.

"I've got the video," he remarked flatly. He took a final glance at the blood- and oil-smirched tarmac, forcing himself to assess the situation as nothing more than a potential hazard on the road. The death and destruction didn't phase him – fifteen years at the Academy saw to that with shocking efficiency – and he couldn't bring himself to muster a single shred of sympathy for this degenerate clan of disgusting rapists, but the grotesque suddenness and futility of it all sickened him. For the first time in his career, he hadn't followed up on something – and _couldn't_ follow up on something. It was a dangerous fool's errand to try – to deliberately let one go and pursue it into the twisted warren of the ruins; home-territory where they would have the advantage of more than numbers – but it still rankled. He tried not to think about what horrors would lie back at the Broodlords' hideout, but his imagination was too good. He shivered as he closed his eyes behind his visor, trying to banish the image of every woman he'd ever known or cared about staked down, spread-eagled, violated and impregnated, screaming for help that never came.

He opened his eyes and spat himself, his sputum splashing next to Harley's – the dead bandit's expression didn't change, and it didn't make him feel any better. Cornelius wiped the cold sweat of fear off his upper lip and twisted the throttle of his bike, spinning his rear wheel around and accelerating past the rig, sliding himself into place next to Harley. He bit down, cutting the blue 42 link, and spoke quietly to his lawmaster. "Bike," he ordered, "take note of GPS and dispatch repair and clean-up request to highway maintenance when link can be established. Attach after-action report." The corpses and wrecks were a hazard to traffic, and the dog-vultures wouldn't eat steel. Privately, he wondered if even they could stomach the Broodlords. The earthwork ramps needed to be removed as well, although it was inevitable the bandits would rebuild them in order to carry on their turf war, fighting for the right to these Grud-forsaken rad-ruins and wastes. His bike beeped in affirmation.

"Step it up," ordered Harley in his ear. She accelerated to just over a hundred, Cornelius keeping step with her, the two of them gradually easing ahead of the rig. "Anything else out there, Judge?" she asked. Cornelius checked his bike's sensors.

"Nothing showing," he said, "but that doesn't mean it's quiet. Maybe we'll get lucky," he added.

"Maybe," agreed Harley. She paused, glanced over at him. "I wonder," she remarked softly, "what would you consider luck?" Cornelius didn't answer, but Big Dan laughed grimly.

"I'm thinking you want another crack at 'em, Judge," he said perceptively. His mouth sounded full – riding in the high cab, with the AutoDrive system engaged, he had the luxury of being able to eat and drink, even take his eyes off the road and lightly doze. "Can't say as I blame you – two, three years ago I was part of a convoy on this route? Broodlords split us up, drove one of the trucks off the road. Pretty little thing called Carly driving it." Cornelius and Harley could practically hear him shaking his head in disbelief and revulsion. "By the time we found her, she was . . ."

"Let's have some radio discipline, can we?" asked Cornelius sharply. Next to him, separated by a wide lane of blacktop, Harley looked over at him. He felt her gaze and turned to face her. She lifted a gloved hand and flashed two fingers, and then four.

Obediently, Cornelius switched his radio to blue-24 – at the speeds they were traveling, there was no way they could shout to be heard, and so a private conversation required a different radio frequency. "I didn't think Judges cared," she said – she sounded almost apologetic, although she would never (and _should_ never, Cornelius thought) say sorry for presuming the worst about the black-and-bronze.

Cornelius shook his head. "We don't," he assured her. "We can't afford to. All we can afford is justice."

Harley snorted. "I've got scales on my ass, not my eyes," she told him. "You care enough to be bothered – and not like the rest of the city-slickers who just 'tut-tut, how dreadful!' over their sythni-flakes and 'caf while they're reading the morning scream sheets. You care enough to be out here doing something."

Cornelius clenched his jaw. "I'm riding to Big Tri," he reminded her firmly. "It's pure accident I'm here at all. I've got an appointment to keep."

Harley gave her delicious hissing laugh. "I see fliers go over this road daily," she mocked. "You could have taken one of those – but you didn't." She didn't mention the fact he hadn't demanded her papers – it was almost as if there were an unspoken agreement to not mention the personal kindness because it would embarrass. "For what it's worth, thank you."

Cornelius smiled. "Am I restoring your faith in the Justice Department and norms, Harley?" he asked. She laughed again.

"I never had any faith in them in the first place, Judge," she said dismissively. "And it'll take a lot more than you saying your lessons to persuade me otherwise. One thing you learn being being seen just as part of a group," she said, "is that you have to see others as individuals." She turned to him and smiled her gaping grin. "I've got faith in you, though," she added. "It's burning you worse than radsnake venom with every mile you put between you and Cuyahoga, isn't it? You're like a rad-storm – there's calm in your eye, but you want to blow them all away."

Cornelius was gritting his teeth so hard the muscles in his jaw popped and pressed against the inside of his helmet. "I've got an appointment to keep," he reminded them both. "I can't . . ."

"But you will," she hissed, insinuatingly. "You'll be back – probably with a squad or three, with every weapon you can muster. And you'll cut 'em all down and you'll stand in the ruins with a shotgun on your shoulder with freed women weeping tears of gratitude at your feet and you'll look like a drokking propaganda poster."

"Harley . . ." Cornelius chided.

"And, you know what?" she asked, as if she hadn't heard him. "It won't make any difference in the long run – the highway don't care. Some other gang of bandits will take over. Perhaps they'll be worse than the Broodlords, perhaps not. But they'll be bad enough."

Cornelius didn't answer for long seconds – he knew she was right, about everything. "So," he asked, "why will I do it? Why will I risk my life and the lives of good Judges for something you say is a waste of time?"

Harley was silent for a long time – Cornelius wondered if she might have not had an answer. But, eventually, she spoke – and, when she did, her voice was soft and faraway. "I born near the Radhattan boundary – the Helson River ran right past our block. The wall was broken there, and who the drokk cared enough to have it repaired? Certainly no-one while I was a kid. There was a little beach there – ground-up plasteen granules and water-worn ceramics from the factories upriver. One day, there was a storm – we hid in our apartment." Harley laughed at the irony of it. "Of course," she said, "I was always hidden. But, that day, we all hid. And when the storm passed, the beach was strewn with little twitching starfish – the waves must have thrown a shoal of them up on the sand. And they just lay there, dying, twitching, waving their legs pathetically. I couldn't stand it – I ran down and I grabbed them, one by one, and I threw them back into the river. There were hundreds of them – thousands, maybe. My mother ran after me, grabbed me, told me I was an idiot for going outside – but, more than that, she told me I couldn't help them all." Cornelius heard Harley inhale sharply, trying to master herself. "I was very angry with my mother," she whispered huskily. "I grabbed a starfish and flung it as far as I could – not too far, I was just a kid, but it landed in the river. I told her I helped that one. She slapped me and told me to shut my smart mouth. I ran away, down the beach. A Judge picked me up five minutes later. I never saw my family again."

Towards the end of her soliloquy, Harley was simply stating facts; detached, disconnected, unemotional – as if she were a new-learner of English reading example sentences. "I'm sorry," said Cornelius lamely.

Harley hissed venomously. "I don't want your drokking sympathy!" she spat.

"And you don't have it," he said sharply. "I'm a Judge, remember? We don't care – we can't afford to care. All we can afford is justice. And what happened to you was unjust, and what happened to Carly was unjust, and what happened to the spugging _starfish_ was unjust. The _world_ is unjust, Harley – it's unbalanced, it's unfair; good people die of cancer, bad people win the lottery. And _that_ is what being a Judge means, and what I'm sorry you've never seen and what I will die to make you see if I have to. We make _justice_, or the nearest facsimile to it we can manage. And we do so without fear, favor, affection or ill-will, to the last bullet in our guns and the last drop of blood in our veins." He mastered himself and sighed. "But never, _ever_, confuse what I do with compassion," he warned her.

His voice was so passionate, so earnest, so utterly assured, even on the verge of breaking, that she almost believed him. But not quite. She shook her head. "I still call it caring," she said quietly, very deliberately switching back to blue-42 to signal the conversation was at an end.

**A / n :** So, some action, some drama, some feels? I didn't expect the story to go quite there – but it seemed powerful, and I enjoyed writing it. Did you like reading it? There's a review box right below this author's note – just type what you thought and hit submit! Seriously; takes a _minute_. If you sign it, I will write back with thanks and comments (perhaps juicy details of future things if you like 'em!) and I will review one of your stories – Judge's honor!

And, to sweeten the deal? Reviewers who leave solid reviews which help me write get heroic characters named after them – no joke! :)

Readers of the comics will note a few little comic touches here – President Booth, Judge Hershey, synthi-flakes, dog-vultures etc. You can find the route they are driving along on a modern map of the USA – just draw a straight line between Pittsburgh and Toledo. The urban ruins begin at about a north-south line drawn between Cuyahoga Falls and Canton. Medina marks the point where the plateau dips down into the flatlands of northern Ohio.


	4. Ride On!

**Prog 4 : Ride On!**

Even at the reduced speed prudence dictated within the raider-infested ruins of the C-A-C conurbation, they were through them in fifteen minutes without further incident. Perhaps the Broodlords, Slicers and others were deliberately avoiding contact with the well-armed and better-trained convoy – only a fool invited confrontation with a Judge – but it was more likely it was merely a particular kind of luck that kept their journey lonely. Whether that luck was good or bad, of course, was a matter of opinion – and there might not have been a single answer.

As soon as the ruins were behind them they accelerated once again, speeding along the highway towards the Medina dropdown. There, the elevated rock of the glaciated plateau gradually fell away to the lake plains five-hundred feet below. Some attempt at a kind of civilization – a shantytown, a few homesteads, here and there a farm scratching out a living in the black, sandy soil – clung to existence in the shadow of the plateau, but the convoy ignored it all, remaining on the highway as it began a seventy-mile long lazy-S; the first curve sweeping north to avoid a protruding spur of the high ground, the second curving south to avoid Sand-Dusty bay on the edge of Lake Eerie.

About fifty miles into the S-bend, roughly halfway between the Medina dropdown and Toledo, a spur-road peeled northwards off the highway. It led towards the shores of the great rad lake, up through the shattered ruins of Sandusky. It was ill-maintained, the asphalt cracked and fissured, debris littering the road surface and there were the remains of justice-blue and orange striped barriers across its mouth. The barriers were knocked down and aside, and there were clear tire tracks coming onto and off the main highway. "That road is supposed to be closed," Cornelius radioed as he and Harley zoomed past it.

Harley shrugged. "Highway don't care," she said dismissively. "That won't stop someone from using it if they need it to get where they're going," she said. "Even a broken road is better than the rad-deserts. Hey, Dan," she joked, "make sure you wake up and start paying attention; don't want you turning off accidentally."

Dan laughed. "If I wake up there's more chance of that," he said. "Autodrive's better than me."

"Then why do we even have you?" asked Indian with a smirk. Dan laughed again – a big, fat, belly laugh that would probably have made him unable to steer if he had been.

"I'm only here to keep you kids out of trouble," he explained. "Without me, you two'd be . . ."

He got no further. There was a sharp explosion over the radio, followed by a quickly cut-off scream and a dreadful croaking rattle. "What the . . . ?" Indian said. Cornelius was already tabbing controls on his bike's screen, setting the onboard computer to analyze the sound and confirm what he suspected, even as he throttled down and braked sharply. As he fishtailed his bike to race back the way he'd come, the result he'd feared flashed up on his visor's HUD.

"Fragmentation grenade," he reported tightly. "No breaking glass, no projectile propellant signature – detonation was internal, suspect sabotage."

"Indian, report!" snapped Harley, spinning her own bike around. "What can you see?"

Five-miles back – two-and-a-half minutes at the speed the convoy was traveling, enough time to make the forward outriders worthwhile, but not too-much so they were unable to assist – Indian accelerated, coming alongside the rig. He looked up at the cab, unable for a second to make sense of what he could see. And then he realized. "Oh, drokking spug," he muttered queasily. "There's blood and guts all over the windows – I can't . . . Oh, Grud."

"Harley, do you have override for the AutoDrive sequence?" asked Cornelius. "I can interface with the central DB if I have a satellite uplink, but . . ." Harley cut him off.

"No, I've got it," she said. "Initiating stop . . . now." There was a dreadful pause. "No response," she said grimly.

"I have no satellite coverage," Cornelius informed her dispassionately. He leaned forward, accelerating to truly dangerous speeds the wrong way down the highway, the radar pings a constant stream as they warned of the approaching truck. "I'll pace the rig and get on board, manually override the Autodrive."

"And if there's _another_ bomb?" asked Harley. Cornelius didn't answer.

"Drokk it all!" screamed Indian. "It's turning! It's spugging well turning!" Without slowing, the rig was drifting to the right, moving inexorably into Indian's lane – one hundred tons of speeding vehicle threatening to smash him and his bike to swarfed paste against the asphalt. The monstrous flank of the rig loomed up next to him, the lug nuts of the man-high wheels spinning like the burrowing head of a drilling machine inches from his shoulder and thigh. In a touch of well-behaved madness, the errant AutoDrive was actually _signaling_ – the orange indicator flashing threateningly ahead of him. Panicking, he didn't think to brake and let it speed past him – they were doing the same relative speed, and even to an experienced biker like Indian that looked deceptively like they were stationary. Instead, he twisted the throttle, trying to outrace it and zoom ahead before it crushed him.

He was too-late – the whirling front tire caught his handlebar and sent his bike lurching. Frantically, Indian flailed at the rig, grabbing at the chromed ladder on the side of the cab. He managed to get a rung in one one meaty hand, clinging on for grim death as his bike tumbled out from under him, being smashed to flinders underneath the rig's massive wheels. The fuel tank was crushed and some piece of metal must have sparked against the asphalt because a crimson-edged blue fireball blossomed behind the truck.

Indian's feet dragged on the tarmac, the synthi-leather of his boots worn through to the steel, his toe-caps sparking on the road. Gasping with the effort, he hauled himself upwards rung-by-rung until he could get his feet on the running board, looping his elbow through the ladder, hanging on desperately as the rig swung onto the spur-road. The wrecked barriers crunched under the wheels, the truck taking the sweeping curve at speed, turning north. Indian clutched the ladder with a death-grip, enduring a bone-shaking ride over the potholed road. He took one hand off the ladder and reached gingerly for the door handle, slipping and grabbing the rung again only just in time. He braced himself and reached again – the handle didn't move. "The door's locked!" Indian cried.

"AutoDrive hijack," said Cornelius grimly. He and Harley screeched to practical immobility as they reached the spur-road, slowing so they could take the hairpin curve without wiping out. The remains of Indian's bike were still burning behind them as they screamed after the rig. "Sophisticated electronic crime, originating in Mega City One. Several gangs capable of it. Five to ten years in the iso-cubes."

"Quit adjudicating, Judge!" Harley yelled. "We've got a runaway rig and we'd better catch it before it runs out of road! It's less than twenty miles to Lake Eerie!"

The bikes, with their higher power-to-weight ratios – not to mention human riders and off-road capabilities – could take the damaged road faster than the AutoDriven truck, but it had a decent lead on them and it would take a few minutes to catch it. But what would they do when they did? Cornelius was certain he could get alongside it and – with his bike maintaining speed – clamber aboard, blasting the door open with a breaching charge; but what good would that do? AutoDrive hijacks were, as he'd said before Harley chided him for quoting The Law, sophisticated crimes – it wasn't just a question of hitting 'CANCEL JOUNREY' on the console. He was no electronics expert, but even _he_ didn't think trying to hack a system with a lawgiver was a good idea.

He didn't have any _better_ ideas, though – blowing the rig off the road was self-defeating, not to mention out of the question so long as Indian was clinging, screaming and sobbing, to the side of it. He grit his teeth and gripped the handlebars tighter, hunkering down more and squeezing another couple of MPH out of the bike, even as the wind threatened to tear him from the saddle.

A hundred yards ahead of him, a sharp crack and a puff of smoke blossomed near the curb – for an instant he wondered if it were a roadside bomb, but when the rattling length of spiked chain was fired across the highway, slithering and glittering in the sun, he knew it was far worse.

"_Stinger!_" he yelled into the radio, clamping his hands on the brakes and bracing his arms to take the shock. At slower speeds a lawmaster could perhaps stay upright with tires torn open, but it would tumble Harley's bike like young love. The word was scarcely out of his mouth before he was on top of it.

The spikes punctured the tires, shredding the treads, slicing open some of the pressurized chambers. Warnings and automatic system notifications flashed in his HUD – warnings he ignored as he struggled to keep the bike upright. The honeycombed internal structure of the tires saved them from collapsing, but the loss of traction was devastating – the handlebars juddered in his grasp, the autocorrection on the power-steering unable to respond fast enough. The front wheel jerked and the rear flipped out, the bike spinning around and slamming down on its side.

Cornelius tucked his leg into the fairing, crunching his head into his shoulders and relaxing as much as he could as the bike slid along the tarmac in a shower of sparks, his shoulder scraping the tarmac and his helmet bouncing off the road. The HUD crawled with static and damage reports, blocking out the smeared vision of the highway seen through his jerking visor. The armor of the bike and the thick leather of his uniform saved him from serious damage, but he was certain he'd feel the bruises once the adrenaline wore off. After about one-hundred yards, he and his bike juddered to a shuddering stop – the punctuation mark at the end of a long sentence of scraped tarmac.

Harley's bike fared worse – the stinger spikes ripped the rubber to shreds, the tires blowing out and the metal rims of her wheels digging into the road. She managed to hold control for a heartbeat and then the bike tumbled, slamming down to the asphalt with a crash. Harley was lucky enough to be thrown clear just as it hit, sliding along the road on her back, spinning like a tossed turtle. She came to a groaning halt near Cornelius, her back of her leather jacket ripped to lace and her rad suit torn through to the blood. She lay still for a second and then – with a single, harsh, obscenity – rolled over onto her hands and knees, her head hanging limply.

Cornelius shoved himself out from under his bike, tensing the muscles in his limbs and inhaling deeply as he did so – there were no shooting pains, nothing serious was broken. "Engine off," he ordered grimly, struggling to his feet. The bronze pauldron on his left shoulder had a patch scoured flat as if with an angle grinder, and the leather on his hip and elbow was scuffed and scratched, a few seams torn. "Report on damage and begin repairs." He reached for the bike's panniers, pulling out the larger medikit, and moving towards Harley. As he did so, his visor's HUD flashed with projected lasers and bright lights – he followed the glowing spots with his eyes, letting the computer track them. 'NO CONCUSSION' the HUD reported after a few seconds.

That might have been true, but Cornelius' head felt like an apple bruised in a half-empty lunchbox – he reached up and pulled his helmet off; on the right side the road had sanded through the outer layer into the re-enforced plasteen shell, but he was grateful it was that and not his skin through into his skull. He went down on one knee by the crouching Harley. "Don't try to move," he advised her. "Let me clean it and get some sprayskin on there." He pulled a squeeze bottle of sterile saline solution from the medikit, washing the dirt, gravel and sequins out of her wounds, wiping them clean with a disinfecting towelette. She gritted her teeth against the pain, her lips drawn back almost to her ears.

Her wounds were extensive and painful, but superficial and not serious. Her back was well-muscled, the flesh translucent beneath the torn-away scales. There were black diamonds edged in ruddy-brown running down her spine – Cornelius idly wondered if it were natural, or individual scales had been painstakingly perma-dyed to make the pattern. He dabbed the last of the blood-stained water away and pulled out the canister of sprayskin, shaking it and pulling the top off with his teeth. "This might hurt," he warned her.

"Pain is weakness leaving the body," she muttered under her breath, but she still twitched and yelped when the first spurt of the sickly-pink goo hit her back. Steam rose from it and the edges writhed and bubbled as the chemicals bonded themselves with her flesh. J-Dept field-dressings were about efficiency, not comfort, and even the toughest of non-Judges was shocked by just how much they could hurt.

Cornelius finished and stood, offering her a hand up. "That should hold you," he said. "Antiseptic and anesthetics in there – I just hope they work with your body chemistry," he added as a worried afterthought. She grinned, taking her dented helmet off and scrubbing her tousled hair back into its spiked pixie cut.

"I'm close enough for J-Dept work," she joked. He would have responded, but she glanced behind him and then – without warning – stiff-armed him in the shoulder. Even given her impressive musculature her strength was surprising, and even he was knocked back a pace.

That saved him from being caught in the expanding catchnet that enveloped Harley, the weighed nylon tangling her limbs and knocking her off her feet, onto her wounded back with a cry of pain. He turned, instinctively dropping to one knee, to face their hunters.

"Ride On!" There were a dozen of them, riding four to a vehicle – three fat-tired ATVs in bright, glossy yellow fitted with roll-cages. Each had a bright blue number painted on the front, with a red pennant flag with the same number whipping from a thin wire at the back. They were dressed identically in red and blue – polo shirts and shorts, uniforms even down to name-badges. They had rad-burns and the odd scar, but the only thing that suggested they weren't perfectly normal was the wide, soulless, manic grins they were all wearing. "_Ride On!_" they screamed again. "Thrills connect! Woo-hoo!"

The second catchnet passed over his head as he snap-drew his lawgiver, shooting the driver and blowing out the front tire of one of the ATVs. The uniformed crazy threw up his hands and slumped, the wheel turning so the vehicle flipped, flinging the passengers out. The one who'd fired the catchnet face-planted on the tarmac with a crunch of blood, but the two in the rear managed to leap clear and jumped for Cornelius, long knives gleaming in their hands. "Guests must be patient!" they howled. "Wait your turn or go to the back of the line!"

"Drokking loonies," muttered Cornelius. He shot one of them through the throat, but the other was on him before he could fire again. He was forced to drop his gun to grab the knife-wielder's wrist, twisting it to disarm him.

"Guests must not assault associates!" The crazy got no further before Cornelius stuffed the nozzle of the sprayskin canister in his mouth and let it off – he staggered back, silently choking breathlessly, the synthi-skin bonding chemically to the flesh of his nose, throat and lungs. Cornelius drove him off him with a raised knee as he stood, snatching up his lawgiver as he did so.

The other two ATVs had zoomed past him, Harley being dragged helplessly behind one of them, caught like a fish in the net, trailing at the end of a cable lashed to the rollbar. The ATVs turned, driving back towards him, the one that had caught Harley scooping her up into the flatbed back as it went past.

Cornelius managed to get a single shot off, sending one of the 'associates' riding in the rear of one of the buggies flying backwards to land, dead before he hit, on the highway, before the compressed-air netlauncher fired and he was tangled in weighted nylon strands. He managed to keep his feet, struggling to get clear, only until the ATV sped past. The cable snapped taut and he was jerked off his feet to be dragged along the tarmac, his leather scuffing and his armor sparking against the asphalt. He needed both his hands to grab the net and stop himself from being torn to shreds on the roadway. He didn't have time to holster his lawgiver; instead, he secured it to the carapace plates of his armor with the electromagnets.

Her long limbs tangled in the strands of the net, her back screaming at her, Harley fought like a woman possessed. "Now you just be calm, little lady!" one of the uniformed loonies told her. "We'll get you some fine cotton candy while you wait your turn for the rides!" He grabbed her throat and wrist while his friend pinned her other arm, cocking his fist to punch her in the face to 'calm' her.

The first blow smashed into her cheek, bruising her beneath the scales, but when the second landed her face wasn't there any more – in its place was a gaping, dislocated, fang-ringed maw that closed on his fist as he punched. He screamed in horror and agony as her impossible jaw ground razor-sharp fangs through flesh, bone and sinew, chewing his hand clean off his wrist in an instant. She spat the gobbet into his face as he shrieked, clutching at his stump to stem the flow of blood. She kicked upwards, knocking him off the buggy as the netter leaned back and smashed her in the temple with the butt of his compressed-air cannon, knocking her out cold.

Cornelius twisted and turned as he was dragged behind the speeding vehicle. "Guests must keep their arms and legs inside the ride at all times!" the crazies mocked, hauling in their catch with an electric motor as they raced along. Cornelius turned his face from the spray of gravel being kicked up, shifting to keep his weight on the armor plates and not the leather. He couldn't get his hand to his bootknife – he reached behind his neck, inside the collar of his jacket, pulling out a needle-knife with a skull pommel from a hidden sheath.

He couldn't cut the steel cable, but there were only six strands of quarter-inch braided ballistic nylon that needed slicing – the razor-edge of the stiletto was through them in a trice and he skidded to a halt on the road, tangled in the remains of the net. He grabbed for his lawgiver, ordering "Hi-ex!" though gritted teeth and blew one of the ATVs into a collection of unrelated scrap and disjointed limbs. He didn't dare use high-explosive on the other one, not with Harley on the back, and by the time he'd shifted to standard and got onto one knee the range was too great. He might have hit the rear wheels, but the vehicle didn't slow. It was soon out of sight, vanishing into the dust of the Cursed Earth, heading towards the veiled shapes of the ruins of Sandusky.

He sheathed his trophy knife – it had been Anderson who'd got it for him, citing 'evidence' to keep it from what the owner would have thought his legitimate heirs, and leaving it in his locker in sector house 119 as a surprise once he got back from sick-leave – and holstered his lawgiver. He started to jog back along the road; he'd been dragged about a quarter-mile from where they'd hit the stinger. Three of the uniformed 'associates' had driven off with Harley, and seven others had been killed – three in the explosion, three shot by him, and one fatally crashing on the highway. As he reached the remaining two, the one with the lungs full of sprayskin stopped thrashing, his skin blue-gray with suffocation. The other – clutching the stump of his wrist to try to stem the flow of blood – was on his knees, sobbing in agony. He saw Cornelius approach and scrabbled around for a weapon, any weapon.

Cornelius drew, deployed and used his daystick in a single devastating motion, snapping the bones of the man's uninjured forearm with a sickening crack. He howled all the louder, slumping onto his back. Cornelius grabbed for the discarded can of synthi-skin, spraying a blobby mass of it onto the stump, staunching the flow of blood. "Attempted murder or kidnap of a Judge," he said grimly. "Sentence is death. Give me answers and I kill you cleanly. Otherwise, I break the rest of your limbs and leave you to crawl."

The man sobbed pathetically. "Please don't kill me!" he sobbed. "It's not even the end of the season – there's so much more fun to be had! Free passes for the rest of the year!" he offered. "Free passes for _life!_ For you _and_ a friend!"

Cornelius smashed him, hard, across the face with the baton, splitting his cheek open and breaking the bone with an audible _krak!_ "Your buddies just took my friend for your 'fun'," he said threateningly. "Where are they taking her? Did you hijack the rig?" The man nodded, bloody snot and tears streaming from his fractured face.

"It's the height of the season!" he whispered frantically, madness dancing in his pain-choked eyes. "She's going to the rockin' roller coast! She will be offered on the track, sacrificed under the wheels that we might be protected through long, dark off-season when no guests come! And the girders will repair the Great Coaster, reaching it higher and higher for the most marvelous thrills! Ride on," he whimpered like it was a protective mantra. "_Ride on!_"

A whisper of fear touched Cornelius skin – he had no idea what this fool was babbling about, but he was absolutely certain this was some crazy Cursed Earth cult. When the Atomic Wars came, more than nukes descended on America – post-apocalyptic madness fell like a shroud. Deranged cults, degenerate bands like the Broodlords, religious whack-jobs, and obsessed loonies were commonplace in the insanity of the Cursed Earth. There was no negotiating with such people, little point in threatening them. They were mono-minded, focused entirely on some insanity, understanding everything through the lens of their nonsense. Cornelius shuddered and leveled his lawgiver, putting a single bullet through the perp's forehead. He didn't watch as he pitched backwards, blood and brains splattering on the highway, instead holstering his gun and walking to the bikes.

His lawmaster had survived the crash well; there was superficial damage to the fairing and armor, a couple of lights smashed and the left-side cannon was misaligned – but the computer assured him that could be corrected with test firings. The tires had self-repaired, supported by the run-flat honeycombed bracing and filled with expanding rubber foam. The report advised him the repair was not rated for more than 100 mph or five-hundred miles of travel. He hauled the bike upright, checked and tightened the straps holding his duffelbag in place, and took a look at Harley's machine.

It was a wreck – the wheels were buckled, the forks bent, the fuel-tank cracked. He felt the pang of loss – this kind of custom machine probably represented the bulk of her capital, as well as being the means she plied her trade. He took her shotgun and pistol, stowing them on his lawmaster. The bike might be salvageable, but first he needed to find her, Indian and the rig. He systematically checked and stowed his equipment, smeared some epoxy repair cement into the scrape on his helmet, and mounted up once more. The engine started on the first try and he swung the bike around, driving north along the highway, driving gingerly and slowly as he avoided the carnage, corpses, and burning remains of wrecks.

As he passed the perp he'd executed he paused and took a more careful look at his clothes – it was absolutely a uniform, they were all wearing the same thing; polo shirt and shorts in primary-colored red and blue. Friendly, welcoming, designed to stand out in a crowd. He bent and ripped the name badge from the dead man's chest. It told him the dead man's name, but also said where he was from. He bit down for the bike circuit.

"Scan map for _Cedar Point_," he ordered.

**A / n :** Awwwwww yisss . . . . !

_**THRILL-POWER INCREASES NEXT PROG!**_ as they say in the comics. Oh, but this is fun!

Alright, for those of who whose only experience of Dredd is the movie with Karl Urban and Olivia Thirlby (should be All-Over Thrill-Me, amirite?) and who are saying "What the drokking spug is this stomm?" (although, why would you say that if you haven't read the comics?) they were _full_ of this kind of absolute insanity. Crazy, loony, nutty satire of current things. It wasn't all future law-enforcement and so forth – it was often absolutely totally loco, bat-spug-crazy _insane_.

Anyway . . . like it? Don't like it? Feel the hinges of your sanity beginning to flex with the strain? Whatever – Tharg demands you review! You've read this far – just scroll down a little bit further, type what you thought in the box below. Takes like a minute – it took me longer to look up the uniforms of the Cedar Point associates.

I have kept some names of northern Ohio sites – Sandusky, the Cleveland-Akron-Canton conurbation – but have changed others – Sand-Dusty Bay, Lake Eerie. I do this because . . . it's my story, damnit :)

But, yes – thrill-power increases next prog. You can be assured of that.


	5. The Rockin' Roller Coast

**A/n :** Any reference to Cedar Point and related elements is used in a parody, satirical or otherwise comedic manner consistent with traditional legal interpretations in most jurisdictions :)

**Prog 5 : The Rockin' Roller Coast**

Harley didn't know how long she'd been unconscious, but the fact her nausea seemed to be centered in her mouth and guts, and not her head, suggested it couldn't have been long. She lashed her fangs clean with her black, forked tongue and spat the disgusting, over-salted taste of human flesh out of her mouth. As she got rid of the bloody residue and shreds of flesh, the queasiness started to leave her. She was glad neither the Judge nor Indian had seen her bite – although she didn't suppose it would have mattered; she wasn't going to see the Judge again and she doubted she and Indian would live through the night.

She was hog-tied efficiently with hairy half-inch hemp rope, tight loops pinning her legs together and her upper arms to her torso, each coil individually knotted. Her wrists and ankles were separately bound, tied tightly enough to make her hands tingle and buzz. Long tracers of rope extended from them – when they got wherever they were going, they would make efficient reins to control her after they'd cut her legs free.

_Drokk that for a game of Judges_, she thought to herself, flexing and struggling, bending her neck to lift her hands to her mouth, managing to get a single fang underneath the rope. The needle-sharp point of her mutant tooth had sawed through three or four strands before she froze, her slit-pupilled eyes focusing with incurious bravado on the knife held an inch from her nose. "Guests mustn't try to spoil the surprise!" the crazy admonished her, his grin manic and his eyes shining with the watery vacancy of fanaticism. "This is your first time to the rockin' roller coast – you have to be patient!" He grabbed her wrists, pulling them clear of her mouth and getting his fingers dangerously close to her fangs.

She drew her lips back from her teeth, snarling her gaping grin. "Cut me loose and we'll see who's surprised!" she hissed threateningly. She thought she might be able to lunge for him at the fullest extension of her neck, catching his hand in her teeth and biting his fingers off like krunchstix – but the knife was awfully close to her face and she wasn't sure just how much power she had in her injured back. She lay still, marshaling her energies and glaring holes in him with her eyes.

The netter leaned over the back of his seat, whistling admiringly at her. "Look at the mouth on her!" he exclaimed. "Almost seems a shame to put her on the track – why, she'd win the pickle-eating contest with ease!" The driver, concentrating on keeping the bucking ATV straight and true on the potholed road, nevertheless turned and cuffed him.

"Fool!" he snapped. "The sacrifice must be made to the Great Coaster, lest its favor falls from us! The drolleries of the pickle-eating contests, the funtime frolics and even ignite the night must be set aside until they can be appeased! The Rockin' Roller has foretold this, and was not the Judge where he said he would be? Do not be distracted! _Ride on!_"

The net-wielder rubbed his ear where the driver had hit him, but still nodded obsequiously. "Ride on," he agreed submissively. "But," he added carefully, "the Judge has escaped, and has killed many associates! Did not the Rockin' Roller ask he be brought to Cedar Point as a guest?"

The driver was silent in thought for a few seconds. "We must think on this," he said at length. "The Judge was proof against our most thrilling thrills, and resisted all attempts to offer him a free pass to the park." He licked his lips and whispered the next, dreadful, words. "Could he, perhaps, be _The-One-Without-Fun_?" The other two associates gasped as he said this, reflexively making some warding sign with their hands – a descending and then ascending motion.

"Ride on," said one fearfully. "May the thrills forever connect," said the other.

_Just what kind of spugging place am I being taken to?_ Harley asked herself. She'd seen her (un)fair share of craziness out in the Cursed Earth – she'd eaten in both Burgerville _and_ MacDonald City and lived to tell the tale – but this was beyond her experience. It was obvious, however, she was going to be offered as a sacrifice to some insane god – this Rockin' Roller had to be the high priest of the cult. The unique shape of her jaw and fangs meant she couldn't grind her teeth, but she latched them together in frustration, forcing herself to lie still and regain her strength. For now, there was nothing she could do but wait – she'd got herself out of worse scrapes.

The road was badly-maintained and filled with potholes, strewn with debris and burned out wrecks. But the ATV was designed to handle the undulating desert of the Cursed Earth and, although the ride was bumpy, it made good time north through the ruins of Sandusky, reaching the shores of Lake Eerie in less than half-an-hour. Harley lifted her head, looking around – the massive lake stretched ahead and to either side of the buggy; they were driving on a road running atop a long causeway made of dry-stacked rocks bound together with rusting rebar and plasteen piles sunk into the silty floor of Lake Eerie. Wherever she was being taken, it was to a practical island, linked only by this perhaps-fragile mole.

After maybe two minutes, the ATV passed through a brightly-painted gate which straddled the road – it was guarded by more uniformed associates, these ones armed with a motley collection of pre-war rifles and various melee weapons. "Ride on!" they said in greeting. "The truck arrived a few minutes ago – we found a guest clinging to the side; the Rockin' Roller has decreed he be offered to the rad-gulls while others are sacrificed on the track. Take the guest to the Maverick station – the Rockin' Roller awaits you there."

Harley looked up – lying on her back and tied as she was, she had little choice. Above the gate, a twisting two-tone blue track whirled and looped. As she watched, a train made of interlinked seats – each accommodating a person securely strapped in place – rattled and rocked along the track, inverting and flipping as it raced along. The people in the seats screamed in a mix of terror and exhilaration. The uniformed loonies around her made the warding sign once more – the hand descending then ascending, echoing the movement of the train – and chanted, "Ride on! Ride on!"

Had Harley had a less-sheltered childhood – a childhood where she could leave the apartment if not the block, and where entertainment and diversions were something real and not mythical – and had been able to travel the short distance south for the summertime fun on the Old Jersey boardwalks near the Atlantic Wall, she would have been able to recognize a roller-coaster. As it was, she divined the functionality but not the purpose – but, nevertheless, understood what was about to happen to her. She set her jaw and struggled, trying to wriggle her way out of her bonds, as the ATV drove through the gate into Cedar Point.

oOo

When the Atomic Wars devastated the United States of America, survival in the face of despair became the order of the day. For those left – willingly or unwillingly – outside the Mega Cities, the ability to make good of, or even _thrive_ _within_, madness was perhaps the most-important of skills. With traditional organs of law and order, society and infrastructure weakened, shattered and gone, new powers rose to prominence. It was inevitable that – within the more-than-a-million square miles of the Cursed Earth rad-desert – anything that could be imagined (and many things that _couldn't_ outside of a fever dream) might happen.

This history – fresh in his mind from the Academy's lessons – went through his mind as Cornelius pushed his lawmaster as fast as he dared north through the ruins of Sandusky and towards the amusement-park. When the bombs came, who would have had the time or money to ride roller-coasters, go to haunted houses or eat cotton candy on the beach? With Lake Eerie even more polluted than at any other time in its history, who would have chosen Cedar Point as a holiday destination – even if there had been any vacations left to have? No wonder the workers there had formed their own obsessive post-apocalyptic cult around the thrills and spills of the amusement-park. _Ride on_ was more than a slogan to them – it was a desperate attempt to deny the hideous reality surrounding them on all sides.

Cornelius could muster some sympathy for them, but despair and horror was no excuse for what they had done – AutoDrive hijack, assault, kidnap, not to mention attempted murder of a Mega City One Judge. As he cleared the remains of Sandusky, he made up his mind – he would find Harley and Indian, rescue them if he could, execute their murderers if not, judge and sentence for the other crimes, then find the rig and get the drokk out of this craziness. He had no idea what he was riding into, and had a sneaking suspicion it was likely to be worse than he imagined.

Even on the repaired tires, his lawmaster was over the mile-long causeway in under a minute. The uniformed associates guarding the gate shouted at him through loudhailers as he approached. "Guests should present Fast Lane wristbands to avoid the queues!" they hollered. "Have your passes ready for the roller coaster capital of the world!" But it was clear they wanted to punch his ticket in more ways that one – shots rang out, pre-war copper-jacketed bullets striking the highway and bouncing off the fairing of his bike. One hit his helmet, knocking the epoxy repair cement loose.

"I'm jumping the queue, creeps!" Cornelius shouted – it seemed the thing to say. He cut loose with the bike cannon, blowing the associates away in a hail of gunfire. He blasted through the gate without stopping, smashing his way into the park.

Inside, Cedar Point was a garish assault on the senses, a riotous mishmash of stalls and shops selling snacks and trinkets. The food was all fried dough and fatty meat, encrusted with salt and sugar, dripping with grease and syrup. The merchandize was dusty and damaged; ancient and tawdry tat. There were rusted rides throughout the park, many overgrown with Cursed Earth radweeds or simply so old they couldn't hope to ever run again. Looping through the park was a single, monstrous, hybrid, cannibalized roller-coaster, made up of a dozen-or-more different rides bolted dangerously together in a bizarre, ad hoc track that twisted through and around itself in a sanity-smashing mobius strip of rattling rails. As he drove down the rubble-choked main drag of the park, a train of screaming riders passed overhead, a shower of rust rattling down on him from the loose rivets and bolts.

In addition to the constant noise from the screaming riders, the barking of the crazy uniformed associates selling nauseating food and garish souvenirs, there was an endless stream of cheaply-produced earworm music blaring from ancient, low-quality speakers on practically every stanchion, support and girder in the park. The repeated notes blaring from the speakers hammered at his ears, even through the helmet.

Cornelius drove as fast as he dared through the park, his lawgiver blazing, shooting the red and blue clad maniacs attacking him. Over the noise of gunfire and the music he could hear them howling insane entreaties. "Come and experience the thrills!" they screamed. "Ride the Great Coaster! Surrender to the fun! Ride on! Ride on!" The rig's tracking beacon was disabled, its radar signature obscured by the masses of machinery filling the park. Where the drokk was it, and Harley and Indian? He wasn't in bat-spug-loco Insaneville for his health, you know . . .

oOo

Harley hissed and snarled, struggling against her bonds. It was futile – the ropes were strong, the knots tight, binding her hands and feet to the support frame of the Great Coaster, her body stretched over the tracks. The rails lay under her neck and knees – when the train rattled over her it would decapitate her and cut her legs off, even if the ramshackle vehicle was thrown from the track. But she rather suspected the Rockin' Roller – deep as he was in the throes of rad-madness – wouldn't much care if it was.

She was tied in place hundreds of feet above the ground on a side track of the Great Coaster, a short loop isolated from the main run. The train rattled endlessly around the park-spanning circuit, the people on the back screaming insanely and chanting "Ride on! Ride on! Thrills connect!" as they were jerked back and forth, but did not normally run over this part of the track. All it would take to send the train towards her, however, was a single set of points being shifted. She looked over at the lever and the bizarre – even for the standards of the Cursed Earth – figure standing next to them.

The Rockin' Roller – mouthpiece of the Great Coaster, first of the associates of Cedar Point, permitted to jump the queues and holder of a lifetime pass for him _and all his friends_ – crowed with eager laughter. He was a golden-feathered mutie, dressed in the red and blue uniform of the associates. He had an eagle's head complete with a great crest of gilded feathers and a cruel beak, and long wings that looked damnably functional tipped with primitive, clawed hands. His blue trousers were ragged, with yellow-scaled chicken feet protruding from the hems. He squawked and danced, hopping from one foot to the other, flapping his wings as he did so. Standing next to him was a serious-looking fellow with wire-rimed glasses and a tight-fighting pinstripe suit that had seen better days, complete with dented bowler hat and a scuffed briefcase.

The Rockin' Roller lifted an old-fashioned microphone to his beak and shouted, "Welcome, guests and associates, boys and girls, muties and norms, to Cedar Point – roller coaster capital of the world, the rockin' roller coast!" Below them, his voice howled metallically from the speakers, distorted with the volume, echoing as it came from hundreds of different places. "_Ride on! Ride on!_" The slogan was taken up by the inhabitants of the park, a chanted mantra that echoed from the girders of the Great Coaster, drowning out the screams of the riders and the creaks and groans from the overstressed metal.

The Rockin' Roller hopped over to Harley, leaning towards her as the train hammered past on the track next to her, causing her to flinch involuntarily. "Is not our god_ glorious_?" he asked, insanity thick in his beady eyes. "Your blood will invigorate the Great Coaster!" he cackled. "And the gift of the girders and hardware from the law-lord in the mighty city will flow into it, making it run longer and higher! More thrills! More air-time!" He laughed, dancing and squawking as he flapped his wings. "The law-lord was a fool to think we would not just take the plasteen! Why should we kill the Judge as he demanded? We have _two_ sacrifices already!"

Harley struggled to make sense of his madness – perhaps a futile effort, but she was drokked if she wasn't going to try. They'd _known_ Judge Cornelius was coming here – this was a plot to kill _him!_ The rig was the _price_ for Judge-murder – given what she'd seen of him, that wasn't even _close_ to the going rate. She hissed and lashed her teeth with her tongue – at least Cornelius' enemies had missed him, even if she and Indian were going to die. "You've got munce-maggots for brains, you drokking loony!" she hissed. "Killing us won't help your stupid coaster!"

The Rockin' Roller howled at the blasphemy, battering her with his wings, hopping into the air to claw at her with his feet. "Your mockery will not save you, guest!" he squawked. "Your blood shall soak into the rails of the Great Coaster, protecting it and us from the dark off-season when no guests come, and drive back the bleak day when The-One-Without-Fun comes to end the thrills!" He made the warding sign several times, chanting "Ride On! Ride On!" as he did so. He mastered himself and lifted the microphone once more. "The Great Coaster will have blood!" he screamed. "Thrills connect! But before the grand sacrifice, an offering shall be made to the rad-gulls!" He threw back his head, opening his beak wide and gave a great cawing cry, waving his wings wildly.

Above him, great birds wheeled and circled – they were gray-white, with sharp pointed beaks and disturbingly-intelligent eyes. They bore the unmistakable signs of Cursed Earth mutation – rad burns and scars, spiked and clawed feet, some with extra eyes or even two heads. They called back at him angrily, hungry and savage.

"Cawk!" he exclaimed in excitement. "Behold – the guest is offered at Toot Sweet to the rad-gulls! Their hunger will be appeased, so they no longer eat our funnel takes, delicious cotton-candy and fine donuts _with no saturated or trans-fats!_"

Abruptly, a look of faint panic flashed on the face of the man in the ill-fitting suit. He grabbed the microphone from the Rockin' Roller's claw-hand and spoke urgently into it. "Statement 'fine donuts with no saturated or trans-fats' is not to be understood as suggesting donuts are fine, or do not contain trans or saturated fats," he said at the maximum speed legally permitted for disclaimers. "Donuts may contain insect parts and portions of rat corpses _no larger_ than a skull."

The Rockin' Roller did not seem put out. He snatched the microphone back. "The rad-gulls shall be appeased!" he squawked. "Our cinnamon roasted nuts shall flow unimpeded! Nuts for all!"

The lawyer grabbed the microphone once more. "Guests are advised Cedar Point roasted nuts may contain nuts and nut products, and are processed in a facility which processes nuts and nut products," he said helpfully.

oOo

Hunkered down behind the fairing of his bike, gunfire bouncing off it and his armor, Cornelius muttered, "I drokking-well hope so – misrepresentation of foodstuffs for sale is punishable by three years in the 'cubes, creep!" He triggered the bike cannon, blasting through a stall selling little furry teddy bears wearing miniature versions of the red and blue uniform.

An associate fled with a shriek of "He resists the thrills! He has no fun! _He has no fun!_" as the bike crashed through the stall, stuffed animals getting ground beneath the wheels and jamming themselves in the mudguards. Cornelius reached up and angrily jerked one free from where it was wedged in his helmet.

"_Transmission source located, Judge,_" buzzed his bike in his ear. "_Bearing twenty-seven mark fifteen, range approx half a mile._" Cornelius turned his head and glanced, Kelso's trig courses at the Academy allowing him to estimate how high he would find the Rockin' Roller. His helmet's visual enhancement kicked in automatically, showing the cavorting eagle-mutie atop one of the swaying hills of the Great Coaster, Harley lashed to the track next to him. From this low angle, he could see she wasn't on the main track of the 'coaster – in no danger . . . for now.

"Find Indian," he ordered the bike. "Pull up a pre-war map and scan for 'toot sweet'."

"_Complying quickly, Judge,_" the bike buzzed, sounding almost as if it quipped. Cornelius actually took a second to pause, wondering if Tek had actually taken time to program lawmasters with the Richard Whiteley PunMaster software or something similar, or if he was just getting a touch of rad-madness out here. The distraction cost him as he drove over a small bridge that ran over a sluggish, muddy water channel had once been a log flume of some kind of splash-down ride. The supports were rotten, the plasteen planks perished, and it failed under the combined weight of him and his bike, sending him crashing down into a foot of stagnant water, his tires slipping and sliding on river slime. "_'Toot sweet' located, Judge,_" his bike said helpfully. "_Route on HUD._" Cornelius looked at the map projected on the inside of his visor, grunting in satisfaction as he saw the channel ran in roughly the right direction. He down-shifted and let the auto-transmission kick-in to give him the traction he needed, plowing through the stream and sending up filthy fans of muddy water on either side.

Abruptly, the water ahead of him boiled and foamed, a massive leathery snout opening to reveal a crimson maw lined with bootknife-sized fangs. "Really?" he asked rhetorically as the mutant radgator lashed its tail, driving its leather-scale armored body forward. He hit the bike cannons, chewing through the roof of its mouth, shredding its flesh and liquidizing its tiny brain. "This is why no-one comes to your park!" he exclaimed. "Spug like this!" His bike jerked as it mounted the dead reptile's skull, the handlebars bucking in his hands as the tires slipped on the slimy scales of its back. The lawmaster skidded and slid, the rear wheel fishtailing out, splashing into the water and forcing him to dart a foot out to stop himself from tumbling. His boot squelched in the mud. "Drokk this," he muttered.

He tabbed a control on the handlebars and traction spikes extended from the wheels with a sharp _snick!_, digging into the concrete floor of the channel, letting him power through at speed. He pointed the bike up the side of the stream, using the banked cement as a ramp, arching over one of the walkways of the park with a sudden burst of speed, landing amid a spinning whirligig of giant teacups. The fake crockery shattered like the real thing as he blasted with the bike cannons. He gunned the engine, speeding off the spinning disk and smashing through the railing surrounding it. He roared towards the one-time snack stand where Indian was bound hand and foot to a cross of steel girders, snacks and treats smeared on him to attract the gulls.

oOo

High above, the Rockin' Roller watched the destruction of the ride with despair. "No!" he cawed in disbelief and anger. "No! The sacred tea cups have been destroyed! The ride no-one went on unless there wasn't any other option! The ride even the children couldn't be fooled into thinking had thrills! It is the sign! The harbinger of the coasterpocalypse!" He clenched his primitive hands and shook them at the sky in impotent fury and horror. "The end of the season is here! The end of _all_ seasons is here! The-One-Without-Fun is come! _The-One-Without-Fun! _Cawk! Cawrk!"

Harley craned her neck downwards, looking in her own disbelief, her gaping grin splitting her face. She laughed, sounding dangerously on the verge of rad-madness herself. "Your days are numbered, bird-boy!" she hissed. "Your doom comes ever closer in black and in bronze! There will be no more thrills and _the rides will stop!_ The rides will stop! _Forever!_"

"Crawark!" The Rockin' Roller cavorted in terror on the slick rails of the Great Coaster. "It shall not be!" he screamed. "I am the Rockin' Roller, mouthpiece of the Great Coaster! The dark anti-messiah shall be destroyed! We shall cast him out! He will succumb to the thrills! _Kill him!_" he shrieked into the microphone. "_Kill The-One-Without-Fun!_ Revenge for the fallen, revenge for the tea cups, revenge for Cedar Point! Ride on! _Ride on!_" He mastered himself and squawked at Harley, gesturing at his minions streaming towards the Judge. "We've got him," he told her, more to convince himself than her. "We've got him outnumbered, we've got him surrounded, we've got . . ."

"You've got _trouble_," Harley said prophetically.

oOo

As the evil flock of gulls streaked out of the sky, descending on the howling Indian, Cornelius was done playing games. "Incendiary!" he barked, shooting into the packed mass of birds. The phosphor shell streaked from his lawgiver, detonating in mid-air, splattering the sky-vermin with gobbets of incandescent chemical. They shrieked and squawked in agony and distress, falling out of the sky in a rain of burning feathers. But there was no way he could hit all of them – many escaped the expanding splatter of fire, and even some of those caught by it were strong enough to attack Indian.

The biker screamed as the wicked cloud of feathers enveloped him, a storm of claws and beaks slicing his flesh to bloody ribbons. "Sonics!" ordered Cornelius frantically. "Hit 'em!" His bike responded with a high-pitched, tight-beam, ululating lance of discord which scattered the birds off Indian with pained squawks. They gathered back into a flock, banking and wheeling menacingly above the snack stand, eying Cornelius with malicious intelligence.

Indian slumped, tied to the cross, slack in his bonds, his head hanging limply. His flesh was ripped from his bones, _through_ his bones in some places, his guts torn open, the laboring effort of his lungs visible in sprays of bloody froth. With a grotesque effort he raised his face – not to look, as his eyes had been pecked from his head, but as a final act of defiance. Cornelius skidded his bike to a halt a few yards away. "Ju . . . Judge's mercy?" Indian managed to croak.

Cornelius understood. He made his own sacred warding sign – older by far than the up-and-down movement of the Cedar Point associates, and flicked his lawgiver to standard. "Granted," he whispered, the anger of failure and futility descending on him like a shroud. He shot Indian through the head and heart, and then turned to face the Rockin' Roller. "I'm coming for you, you mother-spugger!" he yelled.

High above, the eagle-faced mutie squawked in distress. "He has denied the gulls their living sacrifice!" he sobbed. "What will become of our donuts, and our hand-rolled pretzels?" The lawyer pipped up at his elbow.

"Hand-rolled pretzels may be partially or fully rolled by things other than hands," he pointed out. The Rockin' Roller shrieked in anger.

"Your pathetic attempts to shield us from the ravages of the law mean nothing!" he cawed. "The-One-Without-Fun _is_ the law!" He flapped his wings, screaming for his minions; associates stumbled up the ladders of the Great Coaster's framework, grabbing the lawyer at the Rockin' Roller's command. "Tie him to the track!" he ordered. "Perhaps with an additional sacrifice the Great Coaster will protect us from The-One-Without-Fun," he speculated wildly.

The associates lashed the lawyer – him protesting this was against the terms of his employment as well as a violation of several safety regulations, and promising HR would hear about this – to the track next to Harley as the Rockin' Roller gestured frantically at the Great Coaster's control booth. The train screeched to a shuddering next to him on the main track, past the points which the Rockin' Roller quickly shifted by throwing the lever.

Unceremoniously shoving a rider out of one of the front seats of the Great Coaster – from where he tumbled off the high track with a scream to land with a horrible splat on the ground below – the Rockin' Roller mounted the Great Coaster and gestured for the train to start its run once more. He crowed with laughter as the cars set off, plunging down the hill and sweeping into the first of the loop-the-loops, corkscrews and other features – when the circuit was finished the train would rattle into the track of sacrifice and offer the lawyer and the mouthy guest to the Great Coaster, appeasing its wrath and driving The-One-Without-Fun from the park. "Ride on!" he squawked, the chant being taken up from all corners of the park. "Ride on! Thrills connect!"

Hundreds of feet below, Cornelius saw the danger immediately. "Sonics to wide deterrent!" he ordered. "Plot intercept course!" He gunned the engine, spinning the bike around and screaming through the park, cannons blazing and his lawgiver roaring in his hand. The screaming noise blaring from the bike's speakers kept the rad-gulls away, but they flocked just out of range – cunning and patient, their hunger unabated and sharpened by hatred.

The train rattled along the Great Coaster's track, the riders screaming and howling in exhilaration, the Rockin' Roller at the front, holding his wings up and cackling with wild glee. Cornelius sped after the train, the HUD showing the projected intercept course, constantly refining and re-plotting it as the the 'coaster and he zoomed along. His pistol ran dry and he slammed it into the reloading socket on the front of his bike, the lawmaster pulling out the expended magazine. "_Turbo-boost recommended, Judge_," the bike said.

"Take it!" ordered Cornelius. He snatched his hand back to the handlebars for control, wincing as the bike ejected his pistol as it slammed a fresh magazine into place. The gun clattered to the ground as the hypergolic rocket engaged, hurling his bike up and forward like it'd been kicked. He said a quick prayer and dived off it, drawing his bootknife as he did.

His bike had jumped the track, flying over it in an arc. Cornelius landed on the very last car of the train, stopping himself from tumbling off the back by driving the knife into the shoulder of a rider like a piton. He got his boot on the rear coupling, hauling himself onto the train as it lurched and jumped. He clung to the restraining bar, slashing with his knife, trying to clamber forward to get to the Rockin' Roller.

High above, Harley flexed her ankle, trying to bring the edge of her boot against the rope. One of the metal plates on the sole had been scoured on the asphalt when she'd been dragged on the highway. It wasn't much – certainly not as sharp as even a dull knife – but it would have to do. "Highway don't care," she chanted to herself as a mantra, working her foot back and forth. "No-one cares about you, Harley, 'cept yourself. Highway don't care. Get yourself out of this, girl."

Cornelius' HUD faded to helmet-processor only – he hoped that was because the bike was out-of-range, not that it had been destroyed by crashing at the end of its leap. He had no time to speculate, however – the riders were attacking him, battering him, trying to knock him off the wildly careening roller coaster. "The-One-Without-Fun has no gun!" shouted one. "It's time for rhyme and crime!" said another. "Kill him! Kill him _a lot_!" said a third.

"Spug you all," Cornelius spat, not unreasonably. "I don't need a gun to handle you creeps!" He slashed with his knife, opening a throat in a spray of blood. He hauled on the restraining bar, making a two-footed kick towards the front of the train, knocking a rider off. The associate fell with a despairing cry as the train hit a loop-the-loop, flipping upside-down. Cornelius held onto the restraining bar like grim death, hanging one-handed, being flung from side to side. His weight jerked the bar out of place and two of the riders tumbled, screaming as they fell.

Cornelius flung himself back into the train as it righted itself, grabbing for the car as the track lurched. He clung to the side, nearly falling out, his boots banging against the Great Coaster's supports, hunching his head to take the battering blows from the riders above him. He thrust upwards, stabbing one in the throat, and used the movement of the 'coaster to fling himself back into the train. He was about half-way along the linked series of cars, nearer the front of the train and the Rockin' Roller.

Up front, the rider next to the eagle-mutie turned, pointing a pistol backwards. His first shot hit another rider in the chest and he never got to take the second before Cornelius twitched his hand and put his bootknife into his throat with an underhand throw. He lurched over, the gun clattering down through the supports and girders, as the track fell away with a sickening lurch and the train dropped vertically, the riders' stomachs abruptly in their mouths. None of which, of course, stopped one of the associates from grabbing at Cornelius, getting his hands around his neck and trying to throttle him. "Guests must keep their legs and arms inside the car at all times!" he cackled.

Cornelius was pinned, having to hold on with one hand while the 'coaster rolled and pitched, unable to break the maniac's grip. He snarled and got the heel of his hand under the loony's chin, shoving upwards just as the train zoomed under another section of track. There was an ugly, meaty crunch and the decapitated corpse slumped down, the hands on Cornelius' throat going slack. "Low headroom," snarled Cornelius, vaulting over the corpse to land in the car directly behind the Rockin' Roller. He whipped out his daystick, deploying it with the wicked, perp-scaring _krak!_ Tek had worked so hard to develop.

The Rockin' Roller didn't seem impressed – he squawked and flailed his wings, scratching at Cornelius with his hand-claws. "Too late, One-Without-Fun!" he shrieked. "Too late! The Great Coaster is _seconds_ from the sacrifices! And when they die, so too will you!"

Cornelius smashed him in the face with the daystick, cracking the keratin and bone of his beak. "Can it, canary!" he snapped, shoving him aside and pulling a breaching charge from his belt. He struggled forward, leaning over the front of the train, but he saw he was going to be too-late – the wheels were _inches_ from Harley.

At that very instant, Harley sawed through the final strand of the rope with the scraped metal. She flipped backwards with millimeters to spare, out of the way of the hurtling train, suspended by her wrists from the track support. The wheels churned onwards, slicing through the legs and neck of the lawyer with a swiftly cut-off scream and a spray of blood. The train rocked wildly, but somehow remained on the track.

Cornelius grinned and snapped the breaching charge's chemphial fuse, leaning over to slap it under the front of the train. He jumped upwards, grabbing the sleepers of the track running above him, swinging from them as the train hurtled on.

The breaching charge detonated, throwing the series of linked cars off the track, cutting through the Great Coaster and causing a huge hill to pitch to the side with a terrible groan and creak of failing steel. Cornelius dropped back onto the track, running back towards Harley, drawing his concealed knife as he did so.

She'd not been idle – she'd hauled her body upwards, getting her teeth to the ropes binding her wrists, chewing through them. Cornelius sliced through the coils around one wrist. He reversed his grip on the knife and put the hilt in her hand as she grinned. "You came for me," she said with amazement.

He shrugged. "Only the highway doesn't care," he said easily.

She smiled back at him, gripping the roller coaster's supports and lifting her legs so she could saw through the ropes tying her feet. And then she looked upwards and shrieked a warning. "Look out, Judge!" she screamed.

Cornelius spun around, half-rising as the Rockin' Roller – his wings spread, soaring easily, his avian face running with blood and transfigured with rage – slammed into him, carrying him off the Great Coaster's track. "You shall not resist the thrills!" he screamed. "Ride on! Ride on! The rockin' roller coast will rock! And perhaps roll!" He swooped upwards, his claws digging into Cornelius' body, puncturing through the leather of his uniform. "I am vague on the details," he admitted, "but _you_ will surely die!" He made to let go of the Judge, intending to drop him fatally to the ground.

Something snapped inside Cornelius – he'd had enough of this spug. He grabbed the mutie around the throat, his steel-trap hand tightening brutally. "Time to choke a chicken," he snarled, oblivious to any reference that might be. As the Rockin' Roller gasped and squawked, struggling for breath, Cornelius grabbed one of his wings in his other hand and brutally twisted. Bone snapped as easily as a drumstick and the mutie screamed in agony. Cornelius manipulated his wing and body so the two of them lost height, using the Rockin' Roller as a glider to bring him a safe distance from the ground. With a final twist of his hand, he snapped the eagle-faced freak's neck and dropped, tucking himself into a ball as he did so. He rolled to take the speed out of his impact, springing back to his feet and watching the mutie's corpse crash into one of the Great Coaster's supports.

He was unarmed and vulnerable, but not in danger – the red and blue uniformed associates were scattering, screaming in terror. The Great Coaster was trembling and shaking, the track swinging dangerously back and forth – it had never been particularly stable, and the breaching charge and crashing train hadn't done its structural integrity any favors. His HUD flickered and the bike-processor elements came online; he looked around, seeing his bike – scratched and battered, the headlights smashed and the front fairing a little crumpled, but otherwise in good shape – standing patiently a few yards away. "_Enjoy the ride, Judge?_" it asked. "_Sensors indicate photographs are available from the kiosk._"

Cornelius ignored it – he was definitely going to have its software checked out when he got to Big Tri. "Lawgiver?" he asked.

"_Range twenty-two yards,_" it buzzed promptly. "_Bearing one-hundred-thirty._" He turned, looking behind and to the right, jogging the short distance to retrieve his gun from where it lay. Behind him, Harley finished clambering down the wildly-swaying 'coaster supports, choosing to jump the last few yards rather than risk staying on the world's craziest jungle-gym. It was a good choice – as she leaped, the whole section collapsed with a ringing crash of sundered steel.

"I think I prefer a quieter vacation," she said. Cornelius, looking around the park at the fleeing loonies and the corpse of the Rockin' Roller being set upon by the ravenous rad-gulls, nodded in agreement and lifted his lawgiver.

"Hi-ex," he said. His gun cycled, beeping metallically. "Park's closed," he announced decisively, destroying the remains of the Great Coaster with a few well-placed rounds.

**A / n :** The sensation you can feel is Tharg's domination of your thrill-gland!

Seriously, I don't have much else to add. There are two groups of you right now (I hope!); those who are saying "What does this have to do with the _Dredd 3D_ movie?" and those of you who are saying "Yeah, what did the _Dredd 3D_ movie have to do with that comic series where a robot bought a rubber duck printed with Judge Dredd's name while a car called Elvis with the personality of a petulant child went on a rampage on the moon?"

(Not a word of that above sentence is inaccurate, by the way.)

The answer is, of course, is that Judge Dredd has always been both of these things – badass future lawman _and_ zany insanity. Somehow, it always managed to work – I really hope I have managed to make it work here. Did I? Tell me – yes or no, praise or hatred, whatever! The box is right below here – just type whatever comes into your head (to be fair, this was the writing process for this chapter . . .) and send it to me! I'll write back and review your stuff, promise!

The reference to Burgerville and MacDonald [sic] City is from the never-republished progs of The Cursed Earth comic series – never republished for copyright reasons! You can find them at unseendredd dot blogspot dot com – although they won't make sense without reading the rest of the comics! The reference to the Richard Whiteley PunMaster is a comedy sketch done about a fake machine that thinks of puns, named after Richard Whiteley (a late TV personality famed for _dreadful puns!_)

A few specific notes – as I said in an earlier note, I have tried to use this story as a transition from the future-lawman seriousness of _Dredd 3D_ (and "Aegis" etc.) into a place where I can be crazier. I've also tried to introduce the idea of robots with personalities (or what _look like_ personalities) to the world (the movie doesn't have them, the comics do). But, I also tried to make this dramatic, fun, exciting . . . AND to contribute to the advancing narrative of the mystery of the corruption in J-Dept referenced in "Aegis".

Did it work? Did you enjoy it? Did thrill-power increase this prog? Let me know!

One more chapter to come!


	6. Epilogue

**Prog 6 : Epilogue**

Cornelius straightened, leaned on the entrenching tool and wiped the sweat from his forehead. It was warm in the heat of the day, even surrounded by the high walls of the grave he'd dug in the cool, damp soil. He bent down for the last time and lifted the final bucket of earth out of the pit, handing the spade up to Harley. She took them both, emptying the pail onto the tall pile of earth and sticking the shovel upright into it. She reached down and offered Cornelius a hand up, trying not to be too-obvious about wincing as her back pained her. "Thank you," she said. "You didn't need to do this," she told him for about the fifth time. Cornelius shrugged.

"I'd hope someone'd do the same for me," he remarked. "And everyone deserves more than being crapped out by some mutant bird." He looked over to the bulky shape covered by the blue tarp a few yards away, his lawmaster standing watch over it, discordant noise blaring intermittently from the speakers to keep the rad-gulls away. He looked down at the sweat on his bare arms and naked torso – he'd stripped to the waist to dig the grave, his T-shirt and jacket hanging from the bike's handlebars. "Let's bury him," he said awkwardly, "and then I'll scrub up, put my uniform on. Say a few words. Seems more appropriate, somehow."

Harley smiled, rubbing the corner of her eye with a knuckle, trying to pretend the rad-dust had gotten to it. "Thank you, Judge," she said. "I'd appreciate that." He ran a hand through his sweat-matted hair and walked over to where Indian lay. Harley tried not to be too-obvious about watching him – despite herself and all the layers of flippant and cynical armor mistreatment and the Cursed Earth had built up on her, she was still a woman with all the desires natural to her sex. It was more than idle lust – it was the yearning to be soft against hardness, to feel her resistance surrender, for her strength to mean nothing. To simply lie in arms and sleep and be held.

She bit her lip and shook her head – he was a norm, a city-slicker, a _Judge_. Even if he hadn't been, even if he'd been willing to lie with a mutie, she wasn't so desperate, so needy, so _pathetic_ she would accept some tawdry liaison and all the hurt that would come with it for the sake of a few hours of false-comfort. Her life was lonely – lonelier now Indian was gone – and that was always the way it would be. She simply had to accept that – tormenting herself with her lonely loss, probing her weaknesses, was a way to make herself strong.

Cornelius drew back the tarp. Indian lay on a rough bier made of lengths of plasteen planks lashed together like a raft with lengths of cable and rope. Harley gasped and lifted her hand to her mouth; she'd seen her share of corpses, and Indian's was no worse than many others, but seeing her friend lain out like that – seemingly more massive in death, a great blood-stained bulk of flesh – made his death suddenly real in a way it hadn't been before. "Oh, Indian!" she wept. She went down on her knees next to him, her head bowed. "He was a good man, Judge," she assured Cornelius. "Oh, he had the table-manners of a pig and thought I was his girlfriend or some drokk. But he was always there for me – he got into more fights because someone touched me or called me 'mutie', you have no idea! Little things – he'd pump my gas, he'd wash my bike." She swept her hand angrily over her eyes. "Drokking idiot!" she snapped tearfully. "Trying to save the rig! It's spugging-well _insured!_ He should have just let it go – if he had . . ." She sobbed and sighed, hanging her head. She pushed herself upright. "Whatever," she said dismissively, her face a shuttered mask. She reached for the loops of rope tied at the ends of the bier, wrapping them around her wrists and bracing her shoulders to take the weight. "Let's do this for him."

Indian was a big man – tall, fat, strong – and even for Cornelius and Harley it was an effort to move and lower him reverently into the grave. Harley stood for a second by the graveside, her eyes distant and focused beyond the horizon, and then she bent and took a handful of earth, tossing it into the grave. Cornelius did the same and then stood, his head bowed and his eyes closed, for a few moments. He looked up and glanced over at Harley. She looked down at her friend one last time, and then closed her eyes and bit her lip, nodding as she turned away. Cornelius picked up the entrenching tool and started to fill in the grave.

When he was done he walked over to a where a rusted pipe and faucet rose from the ground – it was behind a dilapidated shed lined with shelves, musty and dust-strewn, still with a few gardening tools hanging from hooks on the walls. Cornelius pulled a block of memory-plasteen from his bike's panniers, pressing the activation switch so it flexed and turned into a pail which he filled. The water was brown with rust and dirt, but when he squirted in a bright-blue liquid it fizzed and hissed, the pollutants gathering together and precipitating out into a chunky clinker at the bottom. He lifted the sieve out of the pail, filtering out and discarding the contaminant-gravel from the decontaminated water.

He gave himself a quick scrub-down with a pre-moistened washcloth, the antibacterial gel gleaming not foaming, shining on his muscles and matting the dark hair on his torso and arms. Harley noticed the long, thin scars running criss-cross over his body – obviously knife wounds. They looked serious – she considered asking about them, but thought better of it.

Cornelius bent and lifted the bucket above him, upending it over his head, sluicing the cleaning gel off. He toweled himself dry and reached for his T-shirt, pulling it on. Harley realized she was staring and that he would likely notice. She very deliberately turned away, looking at the fresh earth of the grave. There was sudden finality, a permanence to the whole thing. "His dream was to open a little bar in Big Tri," she whispered. "He used to talk about it. He wanted me to work there – I always laughed, but he was serious. He said everyone would be welcome at the counter, there'd only be one entrance." She broke down, hanging her head and sobbing. "It's not _fair_, Judge!" she wept. "It isn't fair!"

She looked up at Cornelius as he lay one massive hand comfortingly on her shoulder. "You know I'd have died to make it different," he said. She nodded. "I'm so sorry."

She shrugged, knocking his hand off, and shook her head. "No," she said firmly. "I'm sorry – for my moment of weakness." She sighed, mastering herself. "The world's unfair – I should know that. Highway don't care – about you, about me, about Indian. About _anyone_." Cornelius didn't exactly disagree.

"Highway don't care," he said, "but Harley does. And that's okay."

She turned to him, suddenly angry. "I'm not some little girl to be coddled!" she hissed. "I don't need a Judge to tell me my emotions are permitted!"

"Never said you did," said Cornelius easily. "And I didn't say you were anything other than a spug-kicking rad-frakker of a strontium-bitch. But there are little girls who need coddling – and who's going to do it?" he asked. "I can't change the world," he told her, "but I can damn well make sure it's not that way within my lawgiver's range."

She looked at him for a second, and then dropped her eyes to his chest. The justice-blue T-shirt had an eagle holding a scroll and daystick in its claws screen-printed on the front, with 'TUTOR' in yellow text across the shoulders on the back. "You teach Judges?" she asked. He nodded. "You teach 'em that?" He nodded again. She smiled. "Maybe you can change the world," she said softly.

oOo

The Cedar Point loonies had opened the cab of the rig with a circular saw, cutting through the hinges and lock of the driver's side door and hosing the remains of Big Dan out of it. The synthi-leather of the seats and the softer materials of the cab's interior had been shredded by the explosion – springs, panels and cushions were torn loose as if a squad of particularly clumsy Judges had searched it for contraband.

Harley removed the ruined driver's seat while Cornelius – after consulting a wiring diagram downloaded from the AutoDrive database – removed the robotic brain with a screwdriver and set of snips. He carefully capped the raw ends of the wires, storing the computer in his bike's paniers. "Tek'll want to see that," he said grimly. Harley – hating herself for the difference in her emotional responses to the deaths of Indian and Big Dan – nodded, kicking the seat out of the cab. It landed with a crash on the ground below, just one more piece of discarded machinery in the ruins of Cedar Point.

"Bird-brain said the rig was payment for killing you," she reminded him. "You got enemies?"

Cornelius shrugged. He picked up a bucket, holding it up to judge its height. He tossed it down, grabbed a plastic crate. It was a better fit; he handed it up to Harley who set it on the cab's floorboards. She put a pillow from the tiny bed in the back of the cab as a cushion on top and sat on it, testing it for height. Satisfied, she crouched and used some discarded scraps of metal to strap it in place. "I've probably pissed off enough gangbosses for someone to shotcall a move on me," he said, "but they wouldn't do it that way – AutoDrive hijack's a sophisticated crime. Not easy to do, and it's expensive as Hell. There's no pay-off for them if the rig ends up out here. No assurance it'll work either."

"The canary sang he wasn't going to hold up his end of the deal, " Harley agreed. "Said the 'law lord' was behind it – that mean anything to you?"

"Wish it didn't," said Cornelius sourly. "That sounds like a Judge to me – and it fits. J-Dept could get access to AutoDrive's DB, and they don't need to get paid for the job. They could guess I'd be playing outrider – they've got my file. They know who I am, what I'd do."

"We were the only convoy leaving in that window," Harley realized – if she were angry a Judge had as-good-as-murdered her friend, she gave no sign. Perhaps the fact he had to be corrupt and aiming for Cornelius soothed her ire. "If they knew your timing – when you had breakfast with your mum," she added with a smile, "it would be easy to work out. I'm guessing those things are trackable?" she asked, pointing at his lawmaster. He nodded.

"And pretty much everything else I carry," he said. "I'm actually kinda surprised my lawgiver worked."

She shook her head – it was all too easy; except one thing. "I get they could hack AutoDrive," she said, "but how'd they get the frag grenade into the cab?"

Cornelius was silent for a moment, not wanting to admit what was so painfully obvious. "Same way they got me with your convoy," he said shortly. "Gatewarden pointed me in your direction – I'm guessing she checked the rig?" Harley considered.

"Blonde hair, blue eyes?" she asked. Cornelius nodded. She shook her head. "More interested in me than the truck. Tried to make me nervous, threw her weight around, checked my papers with a holoscanner and a loupe – but barely _glanced_ at the rig. Didn't get near it. Much as you want it to be her, Judge," she assured him, "she didn't do it."

"I don't want it to be anyone," Cornelius said. "Least of all Kris. Knew her at the Academy."

Harley's eyes kinked with very slight hurt and jealousy. "Friends?" she asked.

Cornelius shook his head, remembering Harley's submissive behavior that morning, behavior Hawkridge had caused. "Wouldn't go that far," he said.

Harley nodded, mollified perhaps. "If she'd checked the rig," she realized, "she'd have seen the bomb." She swallowed her revulsion at the knowledge that, if that too-pretty norm had done her drokking job rather than making herself feel big by pushing a mutie around, Big Dan and Indian might still be alive and she would be sipping a drink in Toledo by now.

"Maybe that's why she didn't," speculated Cornelius. She looked at him askance and he sighed. "I'm sorry, Harley," he began, "but this is really complicated." Just how complicated he didn't understand himself – and he certainly couldn't explain it to a non-Judge, for a million reasons; Hawkridge's ambition, her ties to Rawne, the SJS internal investigation, the fact her predecessor had gone to Aspen as part of that probe. Harley nodded, understanding.

"I get it, Judge," she said. "I never knew there was . . ." She sighed. "I always thought you lot were all the same, all of you were bastards. I guess . . . I guess I was wrong. Some of you _are_ bastards – probably most of you."

Cornelius laughed. "But some of us are alright?" he asked. She shook her head furiously, the rad-dust getting to her again.

"Some of you are drokking _heroes_," she said. He opened his mouth to speak, but she plowed over him. "I know you probably won't," she said, the words coming out in a rush, "but if you _do_ need me – if you need someone with my skills, my contacts – you can leave a message for me at Jed's in Toledo. That'll get to me. Have to be work outside the city, of course," she added, a little bitterly.

Cornelius looked at her for a second, lost in thought. "Gimme your papers, Harley," he said abruptly. Her face assumed an expression of hurt and shock, but she still reached into her ruined jacket and handed him the trifold packet – now much battered, crushed and bent. He opened it and extracted the documents inside, scanning quickly through them, crossing out words, scribbling new ones in, and finally burning a holographic seal into the corner of the paper over his signature. He handed the packet back to her. "Class I authorization with an open trade permit," he explained. "Free to come and go in the city with the right to pursue any legitimate business venture."

For a second or two, she just looked at the papers in her hand, emotions warring on her face. And then she angrily crumpled them in her fist and squared up to him. "What do you think this is?" she hissed, her mouth agape. "You give me this and you think this solves all my problems? Come and go as I please?" she mocked. She shook her head. "You have _no idea_ what it's like – what I have to put up with. It doesn't matter what _papers_ I have, it doesn't matter what the law _says_. What matters is how people treat me – and they treat me like dirt! Drink from the fountain they don't clean, come in 'round back, 'yessir, nosir, thankyousir'. Class III meant I'm free and clear in a staging area – your buttercup-blonde friend _still_ hassled me! _Everyone_ hassles me!"

"I already told you," said Cornelius tightly, "she ain't my friend. Because of spug like that."

"Oh!" exclaimed Harley. "And that's supposed to make me feel better, right? I'm the Judge's pet mutie now, is that it? You have so many friends you can toss one aside to make yourself feel good and then go back to the sector house and an apartment and a world where you aren't suspected all the time. You think I'm a stront because I _want_ to be?" she asked with a shriek. "You think I ride the highway because I _enjoy_ it? You think I'm out here because I _can't_ live in the city?" She shook her head. "It's that way because _the highway don't care!_ It doesn't care what you are, who you are, only what you can do. You don't _get_ it – you and that pretty, pretty gate-bitch, with your badges and your norm faces and your clean beds and . . . and . . ." Her voice raged to silence. "Check your privilege, Judge," she finished quietly.

Cornelius was silent for a long moment. "You're right," he said eventually. "I have no idea what it's like for you – I can't understand, and I don't even know if I can try. I know this doesn't fix your problems – I'm not that blind – but it's the best I can do. I just wanted to . . ." He sighed. "Mount up," he said. "I know it's buying you off with a pair of kneepads, but if you bring the rig into Big Tri, you're eligible for the hijack reward and the replacement value of your bike. I'll file the crime report as soon as I get satellite coverage." Harley snorted derisively.

"Yeah, _right_," she mocked. "As if it's that simple – they'll give me the run around. Paperwork for weeks, internal investigations to prove I didn't steal it myself. If they _do_ release the funds, I won't be able to cash them – that's the usual trick."

Cornelius set his jaw – _this_, at least, he could deal with. "The Law requires payment in instruments which are universally negotiable within 24 hours," he said firmly. "J-Dept has _always_ interpreted that as MC1-assured bullion or equivalent." She threw up her hands.

"You don't get it!" she exclaimed, waving her meaningless paper in his face. "It doesn't work like that – not for people like me. It doesn't matter what the law _says_, it matters what the law does, and . . ."

Something snapped inside Cornelius. "_I am The Law!_" he roared. "De facto, de jure, without fear, favor, affection or ill-will, to the last bullet and drop of blood. I am Judge John Robert Cornelius and, drokk it all, I _will_ see justice done. BethPlast will pay you, they will pay _cash_, and you will damn-well eat at the lunch counter if I have to slap every single son-of-a-spug from here to Texas City in the isocubes!" He mastered himself and inhaled deeply. "Do I make myself clear, Harley?" he asked seriously.

Harley gave a little shuddering gasp and blinked once or twice in shock, translucent lids sliding back and forth from the side of her eyes. "Crystal, Judge," she said very quietly. "But . . . you can't always be there to help me." _And it doesn't help anyone else, or change the way you live your life_, she thought but didn't say.

Cornelius shrugged – the thought had occurred to him. He swung himself onto his bike, unshipped her weapons and handed them to her. She holstered the pistol and held the shotgun at port arms. He stared at her for a long time. "You know what you look like, Harley?" he asked eventually.

_If he says a drokking snake I will cold-cock him with the butt of this spugging gun, Judge or not, so help me Grud!_ she fumed silently to herself. "No," she said coolly, "I _don't_."

"You look like a starfish," he said with a smile, hitting the ignition and driving off in a smug cloud of rad-dust. After a second or two, Harley laughed and scrambled into the truck's cab, following him back to the highway.

**A/n :** Just a little chapter to tie the loose-ends together. Much of the exchange at the end was inspired by articles I've read recently, including news coverage of the Ferguson, MO protests / riots / police actions. As I said earlier, I've used the mutants to explore some issues of disenfranchisement – specifically, I've used language which is familiar to the African-American and worldwide Black experience, but many of the issues could apply to various historical situations (the experience of Irish-Catholics, Polish, Jews in the USA, Muslims in modern France, Christians in places in the Middle-East, various religious and socio-economic groups in India / Pakistan etc.)

I didn't intend this to be some amazing exploration of the subject – it is far too complex for that. Nor, of course, do I wish to imply anything about any particular real-world group – it's just a metaphor, and I mean no offense by it. I hope I've given the impression that disenfranchisement is _wrong_ and that we should do something about it.

But, also, Cornelius' words show that it is _difficult_ to do something about it – and the notion of "checking our privilege" isn't quite as simple as it seems. Cornelius does what he can – even though he realizes it is a little insulting, a minor help, doesn't address the core issue, and is very selective (in earlier chapters, he openly wonders how he would respond to a less "normal" looking mutant – Harley was deliberately designed to look "cool" and relatively normal; just a "make-up mutie" in many ways). But, we return to the case of the starfish – should we judge clumsy and imperfect attempts to help, made from a position of privilege, negatively?

I don't have the answers. I have questions, like you all, and I've asked some here. Maybe take a moment or two today to think about them? Try to understand the issues – which, I am sure, aren't as simple as either "side" seems to want to make out. There aren't easy answers, and I'm sure disenfranchisement won't go away ever – but maybe, just maybe, we can be the people throwing individual starfish back, rather than the ones scornfully doing nothing because we can't help them all.

Please – let me know what you think; about the story in general, this chapter in particular, even about the issues I raise (although please try not to get off into the weeds _too much_ in a review – PM me with those thoughts!) Box is right there – just type away, hit submit. I know people are reading this story – I see the stats! - but only one reviewer? Please – just let me know what you think. I guess you like it, because you are reading all the chapters, but I have no idea why or what . . .

If you write, I will write back – and will review your stuff. Promise!

Thanks for being along for the adventure; _RIDE ON!_


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